As a pastoral leader, Augustine "Led the community like a father heads a family, adjusting disputes, intervening for prisoners to save them from torture and execution, advocating for the poor, buying freedom for badly treated slaves, and charging religious women with the care of abandoned and orphaned children." (Web:Great Books 202)
Augustine taught that we must learn to love ourselves in God in order to love our neighbor properly. But on a practical level, he reminds us that “all other men are to be loved equally; but since you cannot be of assistance to everyone, those are especially to be cared for who are most closely bound to you by place, time or opportunity, as if by chance."
Contents
to pg. 12