ON THE TRINITY. ΟΝ Translated by the REV. ARTHUR WEST HADDAN, B.D., HON. CANON OF WORCESTER, AND RECTOR OF BARTON-ON-THE-HEATH, WARWICKSHIRE. EDINBURGH: T. & T. CLARK, 38, GEORGE STREET. MDCCCLXXIII. 19.127 HARVARD COLLEGE WHILE the last sheet of this volume was passing through the press, 'he labours of the accomplished translator were terminated by death. Mr. Haddan is mourned by all who knew him as an accurate and careful scholar, and an able and earnest man. TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE. THE HE history of St. Augustine's treatise on the Trinity, as gathered by Tillemont and others from his own allusions to it, may be briefly given. It is placed by him in his Retractations among the works written (which in the present case, it appears, must mean begun) in A.D. 400. In letters of A.D. 410, 414, and the end of A.D. 415 (Ad Consentium, Ep. 120, and two Ad Evodium, Epp. 162, 169), it is referred to as still unfinished and unpublished. But a letter of A.D. 412 (Ad Marcellinum, Ep. 143) intimates that friends were at that time importuning him, although without success, to complete and publish it. And the letter to Aurelius, which was sent to that bishop with the treatise itself when actually completed, informs us that a portion of it, while it was still unrevised and incomplete, was in fact surreptitiously made public,—a proceeding which the letters above cited postpone apparently until at least after A.D. 415. It was certainly still in hand in A.D. 416, inasmuch as in Book XIII. a quotation occurs from the 12th Book of the De Civitate Dei; and another quotation in Book XV., from the 90th lecture on St. John, indicates most probably a date of at least a year later, viz. A.D. 417. The Retractations, which refer to it, are usually dated not later than A.D. 428. The letter to Bishop Aurelius also informs us that the work was many years in progress, and was begun in St. Augustine's early manhood, and finished in his old age. We may infer from this evidence that it was written by him between A.D. 400, when he was forty-six years old, and had been Bishop of Hippo about four years, and A.D. 428 at the latest; but probably it was published ten or twelve years before this date. He writes of it, indeed, himself, as if the nonum prematur in annum" very inadequately represented |