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 Manichæans 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
Manichæans, 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.

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