Haeret letalis arundo!

By these passions his conversion was delayed, the carnal and spiritual wills fighting against each other within him.  “Give me chastity and continency, O Lord,” he would pray, “but do not give it yet,” and perhaps this is the frankest of the confessions of Saint Augustine.  In the midst of this war of the spirit and the flesh, “Behold I heard a voyce, as if it had been of some boy or girl from some house not farre off, uttering and often repeating these words in a kind of singing voice,

   “Tolle, Lege; Tolle, Lege,
   Take up and read, take up and read.”

So he took up a Testament, and, opening it at random, after the manner of his Virgilian lots, read:—­

“Not in surfeiting and wantonness, not in causality and uncleanness,” with what follows.  “Neither would I read any further, neither was there any cause why I should.”  Saint Augustine does not, perhaps, mean us to understand (as his translator does), that he was “miraculously called.”  He knew what was right perfectly well before; the text only clinched a resolve which he has found it very hard to make.  Perhaps there was a trifle of superstition in the matter.  We never know how superstitious we are.  At all events, henceforth “I neither desired a wife, nor had I any ambitious care of any worldly thing.”  He told his mother, and Monica rejoiced, believing that now her prayers were answered.

Such is the story of the conversion of Saint Augustine.  It was the maturing of an old purpose, and long deferred.  Much stranger stories are told of Bunyan and Colonel Gardiner.  He gave up rhetoric; another man was engaged “to sell words” to the students of Milan.  Being now converted, the Saint becomes less interesting, except for his account of his mother’s death, and of that ecstatic converse they held “she and I alone, leaning against a window, which had a prospect upon the garden of our lodging at Ostia.”  They

   “Came on that which is, and heard
   The vast pulsations of the world.”

“And whilest we thus spake, and panted towards the divine, we grew able to take a little taste thereof, with the whole strife of our hearts, and we sighed profoundly, and left there, confined, the very top and flower of our souls and spirits; and we returned to the noyse of language again, where words are begun and ended.”

Then Monica fell sick to death, and though she had ever wished to lie beside her husband in Africa, she said:  “Lay this Body where you will.  Let not any care of it disquiet you; only this I entreat, that you will remember me at the altar of the Lord, wheresoever you be.”  “But upon the ninth day of her sickness, in the six-and-fiftieth year of her age, and the three-and-thirtieth of mine, that religious and pious soul was discharged from the prison of her body.”