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5. As, then, I knew not how this image of Thine should subsist,
I should have knocked and propounded the doubt how it was to be
believed, and not have insultingly opposed it, as if it were
believed. Anxiety, therefore, as to what to retain as certain, did
all the more sharply gnaw into my soul, the more shame I felt that,
having been so long deluded and de ceived by the promise of
certainties, I had, with puerile error and petulance, prated of so
many uncertainties as if they were certainties. For! that they were
falsehoods became apparent to me afterwards. However, I was certain
that they were uncertain, and that I had formerly held them as certain
when with a blind contentiousness I accused Thy Catholic Church,
which though I had not yet discovered to teach truly, yet not to teach
that of which I had so vehemently accused her. In this manner was I
confounded and converted, and I rejoiced, O my God, that the one
Church, the body of Thine only Son (wherein the name of Christ had
been set upon me when an infant), did not appreciate these infantile
trifles, nor maintained, in her sound doctrine, any tenet that would
confine Thee, the Creator of all, in space though ever so great
and wide, yet bounded on all sides by the restraints of a human form.
6. I rejoiced also that the old Scriptures of the law and the
prophets were laid before me, to be perused, not now with that eye to
which' they seemed most absurd before, when I censured Thy holy ones
for so thinking, whereas in truth they thought not so; and with
delight I heard Ambrose, in his sermons to the people, oftentimes
most diligently recommend this text as a rule, " The letter
killeth, but the Spirit giveth life;" t whilst, drawing aside the
mystic veil, he spiritually hid open that which, accepted according to
the "letter," seemed to teach perverse doctrines teaching herein
nothing that offended me, though he taught such things as I knew not
as yet whether they were true. For all this time I restrained my
heart from assenting to anything, fearing tot fall headlong; but by
hanging in suspense I was the worse killed. For my desire was to be
as well assured of those things that I saw not, as I was that seven
and three are ten. For I was not so insane as to believe that this
could not be comprehended; but I desired to have other things as clear
as this, whether corporeal things, which were not present to my
senses, or spiritual, whereof I knew not how to conceive except
corporeally. And by believing I might have been cured, that so the
sight of my soul being cleared? it might in some way be directed
towards Thy truth, which abideth always, and faileth in naught. But
as it happens that he who has tried a bad physician fears to trust
himself with a good one, so was it with the health of my soul, which
could not be healed but by believing, and, lest it should believe
falsehoods, refused to be cured resisting Thy hands, who hast
prepared for us the medica-merits of faith, and hast applied them to
the maladies of the whole world, and hast bestowed upon them so great
authority.
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