These sermons by one the greatest of preachers, and most human of bishop, a man whose lively sympathy, realistic imagination, and shrewd common-sense enabled him own profound intellectual grasp of the Christian faith, were delivered in North Africa in the town of Hippo between the years 396 and 430. They reveal a world very different from our own, yet they continually strike the reader by their modernity, their sophistication and their lively humanity. Besides setting out Christian teaching and belief in a very vivid and compelling way, they appeal both to the appetite for the strange and the desire for the familiar.