This was the great crisis of his life.  He had renounced a false philosophy; he sought truth from a Christian bishop; he put himself under Christian influences.  Fortunately at this time his mother Monica, to whom he had lied and from whom he had run away, joined him; also his son Adeodatus,—­the son of the woman with whom he had lived in illicit intercourse for fifteen years.  But his conversion was not accomplished.  He purposed marriage, sent away his concubine to Africa, and yet fell again into the mazes of another unlawful and entangling love.  It was not easy to overcome the loose habits of his life.  Sensuality ever robs a man of the power of will.  He had a double nature,—­a strong sensual body, with a lofty and inquiring soul.  And awful were his conflicts, not with an unfettered imagination, like Jerome in the wilderness, but with positive sin.  The evil that he would not, that he did, followed with remorse and shame; still a slave to his senses, and perhaps to his imagination, for though he had broken away from the materialism of the Manicheans, he had not abandoned philosophy.  He read the books of Plato, which had a good effect, since he saw, what he had not seen before, that true realities are purely intellectual, and that God, who occupies the summit of the world of intelligence, is a pure spirit, inaccessible to the senses; so that Platonism to him, in an important sense, was the vestibule of Christianity.  Platonism, the loftiest development of pagan thought, however, did not emancipate him.  He comprehended the Logos of the Athenian sage; but he did not comprehend the Word made flesh, the Word attached to the Cross.  The mystery of the Incarnation offended his pride of reason.

At length light beamed in upon him from another source, whose simplicity he had despised.  He read Saint Paul.  No longer did the apostle’s style seem barbarous, as it did to Cardinal Bembo,—­it was a fountain of life.  He was taught two things he had not read in the books of the Platonists,—­the lost state of man, and the need of divine grace.  The Incarnation appeared in a new light.  Jesus Christ was revealed to him as the restorer of fallen humanity.

He was now “rationally convinced.”  He accepted the theology of Saint Paul; but he could not break away from his sins.  And yet the awful truths he accepted filled him with anguish, and produced dreadful conflicts.  The law of his members warred against the law of his mind.  In agonies he cried, “Oh, wretched man that I am!  Who shall deliver me from this body of death?” He shunned all intercourse.  He withdrew to his garden, reclined under a fig-tree, and gave vent to bitter tears.  He wrestled with the angel, and his deliverance was at hand.  It was under the fig-tree of his garden that he fancied he heard a voice of boy or girl, he could not tell, chanting and often repeating, “Take up and read; take up and read.”  He opened the Scriptures, and his eye alighted not on the text