Andrew Vance’s Reviews > The Confessions of Saint Augustine > Status Update

“Could you deny your help to her, when it was by your grace that she was what she was, or despise her tears, when she asked not for gold or silver, or any fleeting, short-listed favor, but that the soul of her son might be saved? Never would you have done this, O Lord. No, you were there to hear her prayer and do all, in due order, as you had determined it was to be done.”

“If your delight is in souls, love them in God, because they too are frail and stand firm only when they cling to him. If they do not, they go their own way and are lost. Love them, then, in him and draw as many with you to him as you can. Tell them ‘He is the one we should love. He made the world and he stays close to it.’ For when he made the world he did not go away and leave it.”

“Even after she had heard this my mother still would not be pacified, but persisted all the more with her tears and her entreaties that he should see me and discuss the matter. At last he grew impatient and said `Leave me and go in peace.It cannot be that the son of these tears should be lost.’
In later years, as we talked together, she used to say that she accepted these words as a message from heaven.”

“How long was it before I realized you were my one true joy! You were silent then, and I went on my way, farther and farther from you, proud in my distress and restless in fatigue, sowing more and more seeds whose only crop was grief.”

“…on the ground that my games delayed my progress in studying subjects which would enable me to play a less creditable game later in life. Was the master who beat me himself very different from me? If he were worsted by a colleague in some petty argument, he would be convulsed with anger and envy, much more so than I was when a playmate beat me at a game of ball…And yet I sinned, O Lord my God”