“Oh, how late art thou come, O my Joy!”

The course of his education—­for the Bar, as we should say—­carried him from home to Carthage, where he rapidly forgot the pure counsels of his mother “as old wife’s consailes.”  “And we delighted in doing ill, not only for the pleasure of the fact, but even for the affection of prayse.”  Even Monica, it seems, justified the saying: 

   “Every woman is at heart a Rake.”

Marriage would have been his making, Saint Augustine says, “but she desired not even that so very much, lest the cloggs of a wife might have hindered her hopes of me . . .  In the meantime the reins were loosed to me beyond reason.”  Yet the sin which he regrets most bitterly was nothing more dreadful than the robbery of an orchard!  Pears he had in plenty, none the less he went, with a band of roisterers, and pillaged another man’s pear tree.  “I loved the sin, not that which I obtained by the same, but I loved the sin itself.”  There lay the sting of it!  They were not even unusually excellent pears.  “A Peare tree ther was, neere our vineyard, heavy loaden with fruite, which tempted not greatly either the sight or tast.  To the shaking and robbing thereof, certaine most wicked youthes (whereof I was one) went late at night.  We carried away huge burthens of fruit from thence, not for our owne eating, but to be cast before the hoggs.”

Oh, moonlit night of Africa, and orchard by these wild seabanks where once Dido stood; oh, laughter of boys among the shaken leaves, and sound of falling fruit; how do you live alone out of so many nights that no man remembers?  For Carthage is destroyed, indeed, and forsaken of the sea, yet that one hour of summer is to be unforgotten while man has memory of the story of his past.

Nothing of this, to be sure, is in the mind of the Saint, but a long remorse for this great sin, which he earnestly analyses.  Nor is he so penitent but that he is clear-sighted, and finds the spring of his mis-doing in the Sense of Humour!  “It was a delight and laughter which tickled us, even at the very hart, to find that we were upon the point of deceiving them who feared no such thing from us, and who, if they had known it, would earnestly have procured the contrary.”

Saint Augustine admits that he lived with a fast set, as people say now—­“the Depravers” or “Destroyers”; though he loved them little, “whose actions I ever did abhor, that is, their Destruction of others, amongst whom I yet lived with a kind of shameless bashfulness.”  In short, the “Hell-Fire Club” of that day numbered a reluctant Saint among its members!  It was no Christian gospel, but the Hortensius of Cicero which won him from this perilous society.  “It altered my affection, and made me address my prayers to Thee, O Lord, and gave me other desires and purposes than I had before.  All vain hopes did instantly grow base in myne eyes, and I did, with an incredible heat of hart, aspire towards the Immortality of Wisdom.”  Thus it was really “Saint Tully,” and not the mystic call of Tolle! Lege! that “converted” Augustine, diverting the current of his life into the channel of Righteousness.  “How was I kindled then, oh, my God, with a desire to fly from earthly things towards Thee.”