throne, and Saint Jerome was explaining the Scriptures to the high-born ladies of Mount Aventine, who grouped around him,—­women like Paula, Fabiola, and Marcella.  Augustine knew none of these illustrious people.  He lodged with a Manichean, and still frequented the meetings of the sect; convinced, indeed, that the truth was not with them, but despairing to find it elsewhere.  In this state of mind he was drawn to the doctrines of the New Academy,—­or, as Augustine in his “Confessions” calls them, the Academics,—­whose representatives, Arcesilaus and Carneades, also made great pretensions, but denied the possibility of arriving at absolute truth,—­aiming only at probability.  However lofty the speculations of these philosophers, they were sceptical in their tendency.  They furnished no anchor for such an earnest thinker as Augustine.  They gave him no consolation.  Yet his dislike of Christianity remained.

Moreover, he was disappointed with Rome.  He did not find there the great men he sought, or if great men were there he could not get access to them.  He found himself in a moral desert, without friends and congenial companions.  He found everybody so immersed in pleasure, or gain, or frivolity, that they had no time or inclination for the quest for truth, except in those circles he despised.  “Truth,” they cynically said, “what is truth?  Will truth enable us to make eligible matches with rich women?  Will it give us luxurious banquets, or build palaces, or procure chariots of silver, or robes of silk, or oysters of the Lucrine lake, or Falernian wines?  Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die.”  Inasmuch as the arts of rhetoric enabled men to rise at the bar or shine in fashionable circles, he had plenty of scholars; but they left his lecture-room when required to pay.  At Carthage his pupils were boisterous and turbulent; at Rome they were tricky and mean.  The professor was not only disappointed,—­he was disgusted.  He found neither truth nor money.  Still, he was not wholly unknown or unsuccessful.  His great abilities were seen and admired; so that when the people of Milan sent to Symmachus, the prefect of the city, to procure for them an able teacher of rhetoric, he sent Augustine,—­a providential thing, since in the second capital of Italy he heard the great Ambrose preach; he found one Christian whom he respected, whom he admired,—­and him he sought.  And Ambrose found time to show him an episcopal kindness.  At first Augustine listened as a critic, trying the eloquence of Ambrose, whether it answered the fame thereof, or flowed fuller or lower than was reported; “but of the matter I was,” says Augustine, “a scornful and careless looker-on, being delighted with the sweetness of his discourse.  Yet I was, though by little and little, gradually drawing nearer and nearer to truth; for though I took no pains to learn what he spoke, only to hear how he spoke, yet, together with the words which I would choose, came into my mind the things I would refuse; and while I opened my heart to admire how eloquently he spoke, I also felt how truly he spoke.  And so by degrees I resolved to abandon forever the Manicheans, whose falsehoods I detested, and determined to be a catechumen of the Catholic Church.”