Thus, from my nineteenth year to my twenty-eighth we lived, hunting after popular applause and poetic prizes, and secretly following a false religion.  In those years I taught rhetoric, and in those years I had conversation with one—­not in that which is called lawful marriage—­yet with but one, remaining faithful even unto her.  Those impostors whom they style astrologers I consulted without scruple.  In those years, when I first began to teach rhetoric in my native town, I had made one my friend, only too dear to me from a community of studies and pursuits, of my own age, and, as myself, in the first bloom of youth.  I had perverted him also to those superstitions and pernicious fables for which my mother bewailed me.  With me he now erred in mind, nor could my soul be happy without him But behold Thou wert close on the steps of Thy fugitives, at once “God of Vengeance” and Fountain of Mercies, turning us to Thyself by wonderful means.  Thou tookest that man out of this life, when he had scarce filled up one whole year of my friendship, sweet to me above all sweetness of that my life.  For long, sore sick of a fever, he lay senseless in a death-sweat; so that, his recovery being despaired of, he was baptised in that condition.  He was relieved and restored, and I essayed to jest with him, expecting him to do the same, at that baptism which he had received when in the swoon.  But he shrank from me as from an enemy, and forbade such language.  A few days afterwards he was happily taken from my folly, that with Thee he might be preserved for my comfort.  In my absence he was attacked again by the fever, and so died.  At this grief my heart was utterly darkened.  My native country was a torment, and my father’s house a strange unhappiness to me.  At length I fled out of the country, for so my eyes missed him less where they were wont to see him.  And thus from Tagaste I came to Carthage.

III.—­The Influence of St. Ambrose on Augustine’s Life

I would lay open before my God that nine and twentieth year of my age.  There had then come to Carthage a certain Bishop of the Manichaeans, Faustus by name, a great snare of the Devil, and many were entangled by him through the smooth lure of his language.  Because he had read some of Cicero’s orations and a few of Seneca’s books, some of the poets, and such volumes of his own sect as were written in good Latin, he acquired a certain seductive eloquence.  But it soon became clear that he was ignorant in those arts in which I thought he excelled, and I began to despair of his solving the difficulties which perplexed me.  He was sensible of his ignorance in these things, and confessed it, and thus my zeal for the writings of the Manichaeans was blunted.  Thus Faustus, to so many a snare of death, had now, neither willing nor witting it, begun to loosen that wherein I was taken.  Thou didst deal with me that I should be persuaded to go to Rome and to teach there rather what I was teaching at Carthage, my chief and only