Meanwhile, he was a baby like any other baby, who only knew, as he tells
us, how to take his mother's breast. However, he speaks of nurses who
suckled him; no doubt these were servants or slaves of the household.
They gave him their milk, like those Algerian women who, to-day, if their
neighbour is called away, take her child and feed it. Besides, with them
children are weaned much later than with us. You can see mothers sitting at
their doors put down their work and call to a child of two or three playing
in the street for him to come and take the breast. Did Augustin remember
these things? At least he recalled his nurses' games, and the efforts they
made to appease him, and the childish words they taught him to stammer.
The first Latin words he repeated, he picked up from his mother and the
servants, who must also have spoken Punic, the ordinary tongue of the
populace and small trader class. He learned Punic without thinking about
it, in playing with other children of Thagaste, just as the sons of our
colonists learn Arab in playing with little boys who wear chechias on their
heads.

He is a Christian, a bishop, already a venerated Father, consulted by the
whole Catholic world, and he tells us all that. He tells it in a serious
and contrite way, with a manifest anxiety to attribute to God, as the sole
cause, all the benefits which embellished his childhood, as well as to
deplore his faults and wretchedness, fatal consequence of the original
Fall. And still, we can make out clearly that these suave and far-off
memories have a charm for him which he cannot quite guard himself against.
The attitude of the author of the _Confessions_ is ambiguous and a little
constrained. The father who has loved his child, who has joined in his
games, struggles in him against the theologian who later on was to uphold
the doctrine of Grace against the heretics. He feels that he must shew, not
only that Grace is necessary for salvation and that little children ought
to be baptized, but that they are capable of sinning. Yes, the children sin