Stage plays always carried me away, full of images of my miseries and of fuel to my fire.  In the theatres I rejoiced with lovers, when they succeeded in their criminal intrigues, imaginary only in the play; and when they lost one another I sorrowed with them.  Those studies also which were accounted commendable, led me away, having a view of excelling in the courts of litigation, where I should be the more praised the craftier I became.  And now I was the head scholar in the rhetoric school, whereat I swelled with conceit.  I learned books of eloquence, wherein I desired to be eminent.  In the course of study I fell upon a certain book of Cicero which contains an exhortation to philosophy, and is called “Hortensius.”  This book changed my disposition, and turned my prayers to Thyself, O Lord.  I longed with an incredible ardour for the immortality of wisdom, and began now to arise a wish that I might return to Thee.  I resolved then to turn my mind to the Holy Scriptures, to see what they were; but when I turned to them my pride shrank from their humility, disdaining to be one of the little ones.

Therefore, I fell among men proudly doting, exceeding carnal, and great talkers, who served up to me, when hungering after Thee, the Sun and Moon, beautiful works of Thine, but not Thyself.  Yet, taking these glittering phantasies to be Thee, I fed thereon, but was not nourished by them, but rather became more empty.  I knew not God to be a Spirit.  Nor knew I that true inward righteousness, which judgeth not according to custom, but out of the most righteous laws of Almighty God.  Under the influence of these Manichaeans I scoffed at Thy holy servants and prophets.  And Thou “sentest Thine hand from above,” and deliveredst my soul from that profound darkness.  My mother, Thy faithful one, wept to Thee for me, for she discerned the death wherein I lay, and Thou heardest her, O Lord.  Thou gavest her answers first in visions.  There passed yet nine years in which I wallowed in the mire of that deep pit and the darkness of error.  Thou gavest her meantime another answer by a priest of Thine, a certain bishop brought up in Thy Church, and well studied in books, whom she entreated to converse with me and to refute my errors.  He answered that I was as yet unteachable, being puffed up with the novelty of that heresy.  “But let him alone awhile,” saith he; “only pray to God for him, he will of himself, by reading, find what that error is, and how great its impiety.”  He told her how he himself, when a little one, had by his mother been consigned over to the Manichaeans, but had found out how much that sect was to be abhorred, and had, therefore, avoided it.  But he assured her that the child of such tears as hers could not perish.  Which answer she took as an oracle from heaven.