In the second part of this series, Augustine switches his focus to a group that were also threatening the church of his day in that they believed that the church must be perfect and faultless in all it does. The Donatists, started to refuse to be baptised or taught by anyone that they felt was a traitor to the faith since they were the only true church that was allowed to administer sacraments and teach the ways of God to the world. Augustine quickly fought back against this group bringing all their arguments forward to be thought through and condemned by one of the greatest thinkers and theologians of the early church.

Before converting to Christianity, Augustine was at one time a member of a group called the Manichaeans and this collection of works are his attempt to combat the growing threat that this religion caused to the rise and growth of the Christian church. The Manichaeans were a dualistic society that focused on the goodness of the spirit and the evil of the material. While basing their belief structure of Mesopotamian Gnosticism it is hard to say for certain that they were Gnostic themselves. Augustine shows sound arguments to counter the beliefs he reveals in this collection of writings even going so far as to have a verbal parley back and forth with a leading member of the religious movement Fortunatus. Now in larger print!

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This volume offers a comprehensive portrait--or rather, self-portrait, since its words are mostly Augustine's own--drawn from the breadth of his writings and from the long course of his career

"As the psalms are a microcosm of the Old Testament, so the Expositions of the Psalms can be seen as a microcosm of Augustinian thought. In the Book of Psalms are to be found the history of the people of Israel, the theology and spirituality of the Old Covenant, and a treasury of human experience expressed in prayer and poetry. So too does the work of expounding the psalms recapitulate and focus the experiences of Augustine's personal life, his theological reflections and his pastoral concerns as Bishop of Hippo."--Publisher's website.