anticipating his descendants, gladly told it to my mother; rejoicing
in that tumult of the senses wherein the world forgetteth Thee its
Creator, and becometh enamoured of Thy creature, instead of Thyself,
through the fumes of that invisible wine of its self-will, turning
aside and bowing down to the very basest things. But in my mother's
breast Thou hadst already begun Thy temple, and the foundation of
Thy holy habitation, whereas my father was as yet but a Catechumen,
and that but recently. She then was startled with a holy fear and
trembling; and though I was not as yet baptised, feared for me those
crooked ways in which they walk who turn their back to Thee, and not
their face.

Woe is me! and dare I say that Thou heldest Thy peace, O my God,
while I wandered further from Thee? Didst Thou then indeed hold Thy
peace to me? And whose but Thine were these words which by my
mother, Thy faithful one, Thou sangest in my ears? Nothing whereof
sunk into my heart, so as to do it. For she wished, and I remember
in private with great anxiety warned me, "not to commit fornication;
but especially never to defile another man's wife." These seemed to me
womanish advices, which I should blush to obey. But they were Thine,
and I knew it not: and I thought Thou wert silent and that it was
she who spake; by whom Thou wert not silent unto me; and in her wast
despised by me, her son, the son of Thy handmaid, Thy servant. But I
knew it not; and ran headlong with such blindness, that amongst my
equals I was ashamed of a less shamelessness, when I heard them
boast of their flagitiousness, yea, and the more boasting, the more
they were degraded: and I took pleasure, not only in the pleasure of
the deed, but in the praise. What is worthy of dispraise but vice? But
I made myself worse than I was, that I might not be dispraised; and
when in any thing I had not sinned as the abandoned ones, I would