in Augustin’s controversies with the Manichæans.  He evidently felt that the Manichæan view of evil was the citadel of their system, and he never wearied of assailing it.  It would be beyond the scope of the present essay to inquire whether and how far Augustin himself be- came involved in error, in his efforts to dislodge the Manichæans.  Far less satisfactory than his confutation of the fundamental principles of the Manichæan system were his answers to the Manichæan cavils against the Old Testament.  If we may judge from the prominence given in the extant literature to the Old Testament question, this must have been the favorite point of attack with the Manichæans.  The importance of the questions raised and the ne- cessity of answering them was fully recognized by Augustin.  His principal reliance is the allegorical or typological method of interpretation.  It would be hard to find examples of more perverse allegorizing than Augustin’s Anti-Manichæan treatises furnish.  It will not be needful to adduce instances here, as readers of the treatises will discover them in abundance.  Nothing more wearisome and disgusting in Biblical interpretation can well be conceived of than certain sections of The Reply to Faustus, the Manichæan.  Yet Augustin did not fail entirely to recognize the distinction between Old Testament times and New, and he even suggests the theory "that God could in a former age and to a people of a lower moral standard, give commands to do actions, which we should think it wrong to do now.… There was a certain inward want, an unenlightenment, a rudeness of moral conception, in those to whom such commands were given; otherwise they would not have been given.  God would not have given a command to slaughter a whole nation to an enlightened people."17 Yet with all the defects of Augustin’s polemics against the Manichæans, they seem to have been adapted to the needs of the time.  Well does Canon Mozley declare Augustin to have been "the most marvellous controversial phenomenon which the whole history of the Church from first to last presents.… Armed with superabundant facility of expression,—so that he himself observes that one who had written so much must have a good deal to answer for,—he was able to hammer any point of view which he wanted, and which was desirable as a counteracting one to a pervading heresy, with endless repetition upon the ear of the Church; at the same time varying the forms of speech sufficiently to please and enliven."  Certainly he was one of the greatest debaters of any age.  He doubtless deserves the credit of completely checking the progress of Manichæism in the West, and of causing its gradual but almost complete overthrow.  His arguments were probably more effective in guarding 17 See J. B. Mozley’s Ruling Ideas in Early Ages, art. The Manichæans and the Jewish Fathers.  The sentence quoted above is Mozley’s. 43 Augustin and the Manichæans.