It is of him you are going to hear now, for he has left a book of confessions, wherein he tells us all about himself from the first things he could remember when he was a baby, the bad as well as the good; indeed, the bad much more than the good. And besides what he recollects of himself, he puts down the ways he has noticed in other babies and how naughty they can be, and he takes for granted that he was just like them, as no doubt he was.

When he had been fed he was happy and comfortable, and began to smile; first in sleep, then in waking; for so it was told me of myself, and I believed; for we see the like in other infants, though of myself I remember it not. Then gradually he moved his head and looked about, and certain things, such as the window, or the blazing logs on the hearth, would fix themselves on his mind. Very likely he thought how nice it would be to have the sunbeams or the flames to play with, and gave little coos and cries and stretched out his arms towards them, and Monica, his mother, or his nurse, would come and take him up from his cradle and show him a bright jewel or a pretty toy to content him. But often he would not be satisfied with these, and was, he says, angry with them for not serving me, and avenged myself on them by tears. Such, he adds, have I learnt infants to be from observing them, and that I was myself such, they, all unconscious, have shown me better than my nurses who knew it.

After a while he ceases to be a baby and becomes a speaking boy, and he writes from his own memory of how things happened to him.

It was not that my elders taught me words, but when they named any object and looked towards it, I saw the way their eyes went, and remembered the name they had uttered. And by constantly hearing words as they came in various sentences, I understood the object that they signified, and having broken in my mouth to these signs, I thereby gave utterance to my will.

Now Augustine was getting quite a big boy, and Monica's friends all told her she must send him to school. She did not want to part with him even for a few hours in the day, but his father agreed that it must be, so she was obliged to yield, and perhaps Augustine himself was anxious to go, like his play-fellows. But he very soon wished himself at home again, even though the other boys might laugh at him for being a baby.

I was put to school to get learning, in which I, poor wretch, knew not what use there was; and yet, if idle in learning, I was beaten. For this was judged right by our forefathers; and many, passing the same course before us, framed for us weary paths, through which we were fain to pass. Then Augustine, though small, began to pray that he might not be beaten at school, but this prayer was not always answered. He admits, however, that the torments he and his school-fellows suffered from their masters were not altogether without excuse. We wanted not, he says, memory or capacity, but our sole delight was play, and for this, he observes, we were punished by those who themselves were doing the like. Yet whatever St. Augustine may have thought at the time, teaching naughty little boys lessons they will not learn is not a very amusing occupation; and if any boy fancies it is, let him try it in earnest for an hour. Will any person of sense, complains Augustine, approve of my being beaten because by playing at ball I made less progress in my studies? and if he who beat me was worsted in some argument with another tutor, he was more angry than I when I lost a game.

In spite of these reasonings and grumblings, when Augustine was a few years older, he allows that the beatings had their use. I loved not study, he confesses, and hated to be forced to it. Yet I was forced; and this was well done towards me, for unless forced I had not learnt. He told endless lies to his tutors and his parents, to enable him to shirk school and play instead, or see vain shows. He was greedy too, and stole fruit and sweet things from the dinner table at home, not always to eat himself, but to give as bribes to other boys to let him win in their matches; in fact, he never minded cheating, if he could not gain the victory fairly, so eager was he. This is worse than anything he has yet told us, and it is to be feared that even after sixteen hundred years, little boys, and even little girls, still sin in this way. Augustine knew all the while that he ought to be ashamed of himself, but if he was found out, he chose rather to quarrel than to yield. And after a while shame did its work, and he learned to delight in truth, and to practise it.

Perhaps Augustine's parents may have been anxious to take him away from bad companions, as they sent him for a year to study grammar and public speaking in the city of Madaura, intending him to proceed to Carthage. But at the end of the year, his father, always a poor man, found he was not able to afford the money, and so Augustine, now fifteen, was kept at home in idleness. His father, at this time preparing for baptism, does not appear to have given up many of his heathen ideas, for, according to his son's own account, he allowed the boy to do just as he liked and to drift back into evil ways, without attempting to stop him. Yet some of his misdeeds, such as stealing, were undertaken through sheer love of fun and danger, and not from any desire to keep the spoil.

I stole, he writes, that of which I had enough, and much better. Nor cared I to enjoy what I stole, but joyed in the theft and sin itself. A pear-tree there was near our vineyard, laden with fruit, tempting neither for colour nor taste. To shake and rob this, some young fellows of us went late one night (having, as was our custom, been idling in the streets till then), and took huge baskets of pears, not for our eating, but to fling to the hogs, after we had just tasted them. And this, he adds, we enjoyed doing, merely because we knew it was wrong; and if the taste of the pears were at all sweet, it was only because they were stolen.

Many years have passed when Augustine writes about the theft, and grieves over the sinfulness of his state when he took pleasure in such doings; but he has worse tales to tell of his life in Carthage where he spent the three following years. He loved chariot-racing, the fights of the gladiators, most of all the theatre. Here he wept and laughed with the actors in the plays as if their joys and sorrows had been real ones. But in spite of this he never thought of giving up his own amusements to help other people, and spent his hours in gambling and drinking and playing rude and unkind tricks upon the people he met. Yet, happily for Augustine, he was saved by the very ambition which he thinks so great a fault, and joyed proudly and swelled with arrogance, when he was chief in the school of oratory, or as it was then called rhetoric.

Neither as boy nor man could Augustine be persuaded to learn Greek. Latin he confesses that he loved, when he had got over the first stages of grammar which were as much a penalty to him as any Greek! He laid up in his memory the wanderings of Æneas, and wept for Dido dead, because she killed herself for love. But why, he asks, did I hate the Greek classics which have the like tales? For Homer also curiously wove the same fictions, yet is he bitter to my taste. Difficulty in truth, the difficulty of a foreign tongue, dashed as it were with gall the sweetness of a Greek fable. For not one word of it did I understand, and to make me understand I was strongly urged with rewards and punishments.

Latin, of course, though not the language of the common people in the province of Carthage, was that spoken by the Romans who had conquered Hannibal at the battle of Zama nearly six hundred years before, and Augustine had heard it around him from his cradle, though he was forced later to study the grammar. This, he says, I learned without fear or suffering, by mere observation, amid the caresses of my nursery and the jests of friends, smiling and encouraging me. I learned words, not of those who taught, but talked  with me.

It was, strangely enough, the study of a Latin book called Hortensius by Cicero the Roman orator, which turned his thoughts to better things when he was nearly nineteen. It contained a passage on the love of wisdom, which deeply struck Augustine, who had read it, because it was needful, if he was to become a lawyer, to be acquainted with the writings of the master of Roman eloquence. To sharpen my tongue did I employ that book; but it did not infuse into me its style, only its matter.

His interest in philosophy once aroused, he resolved to turn his mind to the Holy Scriptures, in order to see what they were. But, like Naaman, he did not understand simple things; they seemed to be unworthy to be compared to the statements of Cicero. What Augustine wanted was great swelling words, and high-sounding phrases. Instead, he found plain facts and humble comparisons. They were such as would grow up in a little one, and as yet Augustine disdained to be a little one. By and bye that would come to him; at present, swollen with pride, he took himself to be a great one.

Still, disgust with his past life began to stir now and then within him, and though for some years he was dragged back by the chains of the habits he himself had forged, in the end he burst them and was free.

While Augustine was at Carthage his father died, and his mother, left alone in her home, mourned day and night over the stories that reached her of her son's wickedness. But her prayers drew his soul out of that profound darkness, for she wept for him to God, more than mothers weep for the bodily deaths of their children. And a dream was sent to comfort her in her grief, as one night when she was sorrowing, a shining youth came towards her and inquired of her the causes of her constant tears. I lament lest my son's soul should be lost by his sins, said she, and the young man answered:

Where you are, there is he also, and as she looked, she beheld Augustine standing by her side, and after that she received him into her house, which she had been loth to do before, and he ate with her.

The years went by, and outwardly Augustine's life was little different from what it had been ever since he went to Carthage, but it did not satisfy him as it once had done. The pleasures, formerly so exciting, often seemed flat and stupid long before they were over; the fine speeches which sounded so grand at the moment, appeared so empty when he came to think about them that he felt ashamed such folly could have gained him the prize; the wrestling matches in which he delighted, things too trifling for a grown man to spend half his time over. To win, by fair means or foul, had ceased to tempt him, and he rejected with scorn the proposal of a wizard to enable him by spells to overcome his antagonist, if Augustine would bestow on him a large enough bribe. Though the garland were of imperishable gold, I would not suffer a fly to be killed so as to attain it, he exclaimed, on hearing that a sacrifice was to be offered, and he indignantly turned his back upon the man, trusting to nothing but his own strength for victory.