Nothing of this, to be sure, is in the mind of the Saint, but a long remorse for this great sin, which he earnestly analyses. Nor is he so penitent but that he is clear-sighted, and finds the spring of his mis-doing in the Sense of Humour! "It was a delight and laughter which tickled us, even at the very hart, to find that we were upon the point of deceiving them who feared no such thing from us, and who, if they had known it, would earnestly have procured the contrary."Saint Augustine admits that he lived with a fast set, as people say now--"the Depravers" or "Destroyers"; though he loved them little, "whose actions I ever did abhor, that is, their Destruction of others, amongst whom I yet lived with a kind of shameless bashfulness." In short, the "Hell-Fire Club" of that day numbered a reluctant Saint among its members! It was no Christian gospel, but the Hortensius of Cicero which won him from this perilous society. "It altered my affection, and made me address my prayers to Thee, O Lord, and gave me other desires and purposes than I had before. All vain hopes did instantly grow base in myne eyes, and Idid, with an incredible heat of hart, aspire towards the Immortality of Wisdom." Thus it was really "Saint Tully," and not the mystic call of Tolle! Lege! that "converted" Augustine, diverting the current of his life into the channel of Righteousness. "How was I kindled then, oh, my God, with a desire to fly from earthly things towards Thee."There now remained only the choice of a Road. Saint Augustine dates his own conversion from the day of his turning to the strait Christian orthodoxy. Even the Platonic writings, had he known Greek, would not have satisfied his desire. "For where was that Charity that buildeth upon the foundation of Humility, which is Christ Jesus? . . . These pages" (of the Platonists) "carried not in them this countenance of piety--the tears of confession, and that sacrifice of Thine which is an afflicted spirit, a contrite and humbled heart, the salvation of Thy people, the Spouse, the City, the pledge of Thy Holy Spirit, the Cup of our Redemption. No man doth there thus express himself. Shall not my soul be subject to God, for of Him is my salvation? For He is my God, and my salvation, my protectour; I shall never be moved. No man doth there once call and say to him: 'Come unto me all you that labour.'"The heathen doctors had not the grace which Saint Augustine instinctively knew he lacked--the grace of Humility, nor the Comfort that is not from within but from without. To these he aspired; let us follow him on the path by which he came within their influence; but let us not forget that the guide on the way to the City was kind, clever, wordy, vain old Marcus Tullius Cicero.
It is to the City that all our faces should be set, if we knew what belongs to our peace; thither we cast fond, hopeless, backward glances, even if we be of those whom Tertullian calls "Saint Satan's Penitents." Here, in Augustine, we meet a man who found the path--one of the few who have found it, of the few who have won that Love which is our only rest. It may be worth while to follow him to the journey's end.
The treatise of Cicero, then, inflamed Augustine "to the loving and seeking and finding and holding and inseparably embracing of wisdom itself, wheresoever it was." Yet, when he looked for wisdom in the Christian Scriptures, all the literary man, the rhetorician in him, was repelled by the simplicity of the style. Without going further than Mr. Pater's book, "Marius, the Epicurean," and his account of Apuleius, an English reader may learn what kind of style a learned African of that date found not too ******. But Cicero, rather than Apuleius, was Augustine's ideal; that verbose and sonorous eloquence captivated him, as it did the early scholars when learning revived. Augustine had dallied a little with the sect of the Manichees, which appears to have grieved his mother more than his wild life.
But she was comforted by a vision, when she found herself in a wood, and met "a glorious young man," who informed her that "where she was there should her son be also." Curious it is to think that this very semblance of a glorious young man haunts the magical dreams of heathen Red Indians, advising them where they shall find game, and was beheld in such ecstasies by John Tanner, a white man who lived with the Indians, and adopted their religion. The Greeks would have called this appearance Hermes, even in this guise Odysseus met him in the oak wood of Circe's Isle. But Augustine was not yet in his mother's faith; he still taught and studied rhetoric, contending for its prizes, but declining to be aided by a certain wizard of his acquaintance. He had entered as a competitor for a "Tragicall poeme," but was too sportsmanlike to seek victory by art necromantic. Yet he followed after Astrologers, because they used no sacrifices, and did not pretend to consult spirits.