“The only thing which damped my zeal was, that the nameof Christ was not there,—that precious name, which from my mother’s milk I had learned to reverence; and whatever was without this name, however just and learned and polite, could not wholly carry away my heart.”
He commenced studying the Scriptures, but with that proud, self-sufficient spirit which debarred him from all spiritual enlightenment. His haughty frame, he afterwards confessed, “justly exposed him to believe in the most ridiculous absurdities.”
“For nine years,” he writes, “while I was rolling in the slime of sin, often attempting to rise, and still sinking deeper, did my mother in vigorous hope persist in incessant prayer for me. She entreated a certain bishop to reason me out of my errors. He replied, ‘Your son is too much elated at present with the pleasing novelty of his error to regard any arguments, as appears by the pleasure he takes in puzzling many ignorant persons with his captious questions. Let him alone: only continue to pray to the Lord for him. It is not possible that a child of such tears should perish.’”
“My mother,” writes Augustine, “has often told me since, that this answer impressed her mind like a voice from heaven.”
For nine years, from the nineteenth to the twenty-eighth of his age, this very brilliant young man lived in the indulgence of practices which he knew to be sinful. His pride of character and his high intellectual attainments precluded his entrance upon scenes of low and vulgar vice. He was genteelly and fashionably wicked. He had attained distinction as a teacher of rhetoric, and supported himself in that way. There was a young man in Carthage who had been a nominal Christian, the child of Christian parents, and a companion and friend of Augustine from childhood. A very strong friendship sprang up between them; and Augustine succeeded in drawing this young man away from the Christian faith, and in luring him into his own paths of error and of sin.
This young man was taken dangerously sick. When unconscious, and apparently near his end, he was, by the wish of his parents, baptized. Contrary to all expectation, he recovered. Augustine writes,—
“I regarded his baptism when in a state of unconsciousness with great indifference, not doubting that he would adhere to my instructions. As soon as I had an opportunity of conversing with him, I attempted to turn into ridicule his late baptism, in which I expected his concurrence. But he dreaded me as an enemy, and with wonderful freedom admonished me, that, if I would be his friend, I should drop the subject. Confounded at this unexpected behavior, I deferred the conversation till he should be thoroughly recovered.”
There was a relapse, and the young man died. Augustine was overwhelmed with anguish: remorse was manifestly in some degree commingled with his grief. Time gradually lessened his sorrow; and in his restlessness he resolved to go to Rome, there to seek new excitements and a larger field of ambition. Knowing that his widowed mother’s heart would be broken by his abandonment of her, he deceived her, and, upon pretence of taking a sail with a friend, left his home to seek his fortune in the renowned metropolis of the world.
“Thus,” he writes, “did I deceive my mother; and such a mother! Yet was I preserved from the dangers of the sea, foul as I was in the mire of sin. But the time was coming when thou, O God! wouldst wipe away my mother’s tears; and even this base undutifulness thou hast forgiven me. The wind favored us, and carried us out of sight of shore. In the morning, my mother was distracted with grief: she wept and wailed, and was inconsolable in her violent agonies. In her, affection was very strong. But, wearied of grief, she returned to her former employment of praying for me, and went home; while I continued my journey to Rome.”
Soon after his arrival in the city, he was taken dangerously sick, and his life was despaired of. In the lethargy of his sickness, he thought but little of his sins and his danger. His mother, though uninformed of his sickness, repaired to the church every morning and evening, there to pray for the conversion of her son. Gradually Augustine regained his health, and was invited to give some lectures upon rhetoric in Milan. Bishop Ambrose was pastor of the church there,—a man ofsuperior intellectual powers, and who had acquired renown both as a logician and an orator. Young Augustine called upon the bishop.