By the end of bk vii Augustine has completed his original programme of first establishing the starting-point of faith—that is to say examining the revelation of the mystery of the Trinity in scripture—and then going on to justify it or account for it, against Arians and others, in the language of metaphysics and logic. His work is finished then, apparently, and yet he is still not halfway through. He gives us the key to his intentions in the short prologue to bk viii; he is going to go over the same ground all over again, but in ‘a more inward manner’, a characteristically Augustinian design. So far we have been considering the mystery of the Trinity objectively, as something ‘out there’, seen from the outside. But this can hardly satisfy us unless our interests are merely academic. We must find our way inside the mystery, and the way into God is into ourselves.