28 with God.  All things were made by Him; and without Him was not anything made that was made.’"15 In other words, Augustin thought that he discerned complete harmony between the prologue of John’s gospel and the teachings of the Platonists, and in this teaching, thus corroborated, he found the solution of the problem that had caused him such anguish of soul.  In this connection Augustin points out in some detail the features that Platonism and Christianity have in common.  Thus Neo-Platonism, not blindly followed, but adapted to his Christian purpose, became not only a means of deliverance to Augustin himself, but a mighty weapon for the combating of Manichæan error. Neo-Platonism enters so largely and influentially into Augustin’s polemics against Manichæism that it will be apposite here to inquire into the extent and the nature of Au- gustin’s dependence on this system of thought.  Much has been written on this subject, es- pecially by German and French scholars.  A brief statement of some of the more important points of contact is all that is allowable in an essay like this.  Premising, therefore, that Pla- tonism essentially influenced the entire circle of Augustin’s theological and philosophical thinking, let us first examine the Neo-Platonic and Augustinian conceptions of God.  With Augustin God is absolutely simple and immutable, incomprehensible by men in their present state of existence, exalted above all human powers of thought or expression.  All things may be said of God, and yet nothing worthily; God is honored more by reverential silence than by any human voice.  He is better known by not being known; it is easier to say what He is not, than what He is.  God is wanting in qualities; has no variety and multitude of properties and attributes; is absolutely simple.  By no means is God to be called substance, for the word substance pertains to a certain accident; nor is it allowable to think of Him as composed of substance and of accidents.  Divine qualities are therefore purely subjective.  There is no discrimination in God of substance and accidents, of potency and act, of matter and form, of universal and singular, of superior and inferior.  To know, to will, to do, to be, are in God equivalent and identical.  Eternity itself is the substance of God, which has nothing mutable, nothing past, nothing future.  God makes new things, without being Himself new, unchange- able He makes changeable things, He always works and always rests.  The changes that take place in the world do not fall in the will of God, but solely in the things moved by God.  God changes them out of His unchangeable counsel.  For nearly every one of these statements an almost exact parallel can be pointed out in the writings of Plotinus, the Neo-Platonic writer with whom Augustin was most conversant.16  It would be easy to point out that Au- gustin here goes to a dangerous extreme, and narrowly escapes fatalism on the one hand, 15 Confessions, Book. VII. ch. 9, vol. 1. p. 108, of the present series. 16 See G. Loesche:  De Augustino Plotinizante in Doctrina de Deo Disserenda, Jenæ, 1880.  Also, Dorner:  Augustinus, Zeller, Ueberweg, Ritter, and Erdmann:  Histories of Philosophy, sections on Augustin and Neo- Platonism. 40 Augustin and the Manichæans.