Interesting St. Augustine sermon quote re belief

Still researching my original topic. Anyway, I wanted to share this quote from the great St. Augustine (354-430) from one of his sermons. I want to use it as a way to illustrate some of the faith and reason interpretive skills I've been teaching. He said:

The Church is spread throughout the whole world: all nations have the Church. Let no one deceive you; it is true, it is the Catholic Church. Christ we have not seen, but we have her; let us believe as regards Him. The Apostles, on the contrary, saw Him, but they believed as regards her. (Sermon 238).

Rather than just gliding over these sentences and thinking, "Well, that's a nice statement of faith," analyze it like a scholar. You can glean these observations by doing so:

1. During the 4Th century every nation (that is, all the nations that were known of at that time in history) had at least a few Catholic present.
2. Therefore, people who state that the faith does not exist are incorrect, because obviously there is a shared belief that has penetrated every nation, whether it be a small presence or a large one, the point is that the common belief is unified through all nations in some degree.
3. The basic premise of faith is the ability to believe what one has not physically seen, so he reiterates that the Catholic Church is the "see-able" part of the faith, since obviously they cannot see Jesus Christ, who passed from the earth several hundred years previously.
4. The Apostles had the ability to see Jesus Christ in person, while they had to "have faith" in the future Catholic Church.

See, from a few sentences you can get solid facts about Church and societal conditions at this time in faith history plus a very interesting observation about faith. I'm not sure many people have thought about the fact that the Apostles "had" Jesus right in front of them; they had to have "faith" in the future Catholic Church. People today have the Catholic Church, and have to have "faith" in Jesus, who they do not have physically present in their midst (and will not until the End of Days).

Slowing down and reading what someone writes, whether clerical or a layperson, from a point in time and not just glossing over it as just another thing to say gives real insights about not only that person's beliefs and assertions, but actually kind of a spyglass back into that point of time in human and faith history. This is similar to what I wrote two postings ago about St. Jerome's letter suggesting the making of alphabet blocks. Reading a saint's letters tell you something valuable about 1) his idea for a child's instruction and 2) this was a girl child he was advising, so it's not like the stereotype that no one cared about teaching and educating young girls at all. Without having an agenda he wrote this letter giving kindly advice to family friends, and thus modern readers get a glimpse into the much more nuanced behavior and attitudes of the 4Th century than people often assume.