840. Since this is the nature of the Africans, at the present time a revelation is being made to them, which is spreading around its point of origin, but has not reached the seas. They reject with contempt visitors from Europe, who believe that a person is saved by faith alone, and by merely thinking and speaking, and not at the same time willing and doing. They say that no one who observes any worship fails to live in accordance with his religion. Otherwise he must inevitably become stupid and wicked, because he then does not receive anything from heaven. Clever wickedness they actually call stupidity, because there is no life, but only death, in it.
I have had several conversations with Augustine, who in the fourth century was bishop of Hippo in Africa*. He said that he was at the present time there, inspiring them to worship the Lord, and that he hoped to spread this new gospel into the surrounding districts. I heard of the angels' joy at that revelation, which was opening for them a means of communicating with the human rational faculty, which up to now had been shut up by means of the universal dogma of the clergy that the understanding should be kept subject to faith.
* Augustine (354-430) became bishop of Hippo, a town between Algiers and Tunis in North Africa, towards the end of the fourth century; the author uses the words 'third century' here to mean the period between 300 and 400.
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