suffer." How deep are Thy ways, O God, Thou only great, that sittest
silent on high and by an unwearied law dispensing penal blindness to
lawless desires. In quest of the fame of eloquence, a man standing
before a human judge, surrounded by a human throng, declaiming against
his enemy with fiercest hatred, will take heed most watchfully,
lest, by an error of the tongue, he murder the word "human being"; but
takes no heed, lest, through the fury of his spirit, he murder the
real human being.

This was the world at whose gate unhappy I lay in my boyhood; this
the stage where I had feared more to commit a barbarism, than having
committed one, to envy those who had not. These things I speak and
confess to Thee, my God; for which I had praise from them, whom I then
thought it all virtue to please. For I saw not the abyss of
vileness, wherein I was cast away from Thine eyes. Before them what
more foul than I was already, displeasing even such as myself? with
innumerable lies deceiving my tutor, my masters, my parents, from love
of play, eagerness to see vain shows and restlessness to imitate them!
Thefts also I committed, from my parents' cellar and table, enslaved
by greediness, or that I might have to give to boys, who sold me their
play, which all the while they liked no less than I. In this play,
too, I often sought unfair conquests, conquered myself meanwhile by
vain desire of preeminence. And what could I so ill endure, or, when I
detected it, upbraided I so fiercely, as that I was doing to others?
and for which if, detected, I was upbraided, I chose rather to quarrel
than to yield. And is this the innocence of boyhood? Not so, Lord, not
so; I cry Thy mercy, my God. For these very sins, as riper years
succeed, these very sins are transferred from tutors and masters, from
nuts and balls and sparrows, to magistrates and kings, to gold and
manors and slaves, just as severer punishments displace the cane. It