Chapter 15.—He Prays for His Friends Whom He Has Had as Associates in Error.

24.  Give heed to these things, I beseech you, dearly beloved.  Your dispositions I have well known.  If you now concede to me the mind and the reason of any sort of man, these things are far more certain than the things that we seemed to learn or rather were compelled to believe.  Great God, God omnipotent, God of supreme goodness, whose right it is to be believed and known to be inviolable and unchangeable.  Trinal Unity, whom the Catholic Church worships, as one who have experienced in myself Thy mercy, I supplicate Thee, that Thou wilt not permit those with whom from boyhood I have lived most harmoniously in every relation to dissent from me in Thy worship.  I see how it was especially to be expected in this place that I should either even then have defended the Catholic Scriptures attacked by the Manichæans, if as I say, I had been cautious; or I should now show that they can be defended.  But in other volumes God will aid my purpose, for the moderate length of this, as I suppose, already asks to be spared.²²⁰²²⁰     This purpose Augustin accomplished in several works.  See especially Contra Adimantum, and Contra Faustum Manichæum.  On Augustin’s defense of the Old Testament Scriptures, see Mozley’s Ruling Ideas in Early Ages, last chapter.—A.H.N.