Continuing Augustine's Confessions

Augustine moved to Faith

Ingrained evil had more hold over me than unaccustomed good.  The nearer approached the moment of time when I would become different, the greater the horror of it struck me.

Lady Continence asks him: “Are you incapable of doing what these men and women have done?  Do you think them capable of achieving this by their own resources and not by the Lord their God?  Their Lord God gave me to them.  Why are you relying on yourself, only to find yourself unreliable?  Cast yourself upon him, do not be afraid.  He will not withdraw himself so that you fall.  Make the leap without anxiety; he will catch you and heal you.”

I threw myself down somehow under a certain figtree, and let my tears flow freely.

As I was . . . weeping in the bitter agony of my heart, suddenly I heard a voice from the nearby house chanting . . . and repeating over and over again, “Pick up and read, pick up and read.” . . . I interpreted it solely as a divine command to me to open the book and read the first chapter I might find. . . . I seized it, opened it and in silence read the first passage on which my eyes lit:  “Not in riots and drunken parties, not in eroticism and indecencies, not in strife and rivalry, but put on the Lord Jesus Christ and make no provision for the flesh in its lusts.” (Rom 13:13-14)  I neither wished nor needed to read further.  At once, with the last words of this sentence, it was as if a light of relief from all anxiety flooded into my heart.  All the shadows of doubt were dispelled.

From there [I] went in to my mother, and told her. . . . she saw that you had granted her far more than she had long been praying for in her unhappy and tearful groans.  The effect of your converting me to yourself was that I did not now seek a wife and had no ambition for success in this world.