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2. But what was it that I delighted in save to love and to be
beloved? But I held it not in moderation, mind to mind, the bright
path of friendship, but out of the dark concupiscence of the flesh and
the effervescence of youth exhalations came forth which obscured and
overcast my heart, so that I was unable to discern pure affection from
unholy desire. Both boiled confusedly within me, and dragged away my
unstable youth into the rough places of unchaste desires, and plunged
me into a gulf of infamy. Thy anger had overshadowed me, and I knew
it not. I was become deaf by the rattling of the chins of my
mortality, the punishment for my soul's pride; and I wandered
farther from Thee, and Thou didst "suffer"' me; and I was tossed
to and fro, and wasted, and poured out, and boiled over in my
fornications, and Thou didst hold Thy peace, O Thou my tardy joy!
Thou then didst hold Thy peace, and I wandered still farther from
Thee, into more and more barren seed-plots of sorrows, with proud
dejection and restless lassitude.
3. Oh for one to have regulated my disorder, and turned to my profit
the fleeting beauties of the things around me, and fixed a bound to
their sweetness, so that the tides of my youth might have spent
themselves upon the conjugal shore, if so be they could not be
tranquillized and satisfied within the object of a family, as Thy law
appoints, O Lord, who thus formest the offspring of our death,
being able also with a tender hand to blunt the thorns which were
excluded from Thy paradise! For Thy omnipotency is not far from us
even when we are far from Thee, else in truth ought I more vigilantly
to have given heed to the voice from the clouds: "Nevertheless, such
shall have trouble in the flesh, but I spare you;" and, "It is
good for a man not to touch a woman; "' and, "He that is unmarried
careth for the things that belong to the Lord, how he may please the
Lord; but he that is married careth for the things that are of the
world, how he may please his wife." I should, therefore, have
listened more attentively to these words, and, being severed "for the
kingdom of heaven's sake," ' I would with greater happiness have
expected Thy embraces.
4. But I, poor fool, seethed as does the sea, and, forsaking
Thee, followed the violent course of my own stream, and exceeded all
Thy limitations; nor did I escape Thy scourges.' For what mortal
can do so? But Thou weft always by me, mercifully angry, and
dashing with the bitterest vexations all my illicit pleasures, in order
that I might seek pleasures free from vexation. But where I could
meet with such except in Thee, O Lord, I could not find,except in
Thee, who teachest by sorrow, and woundest us to heal us, and
killest us that we may not die from Thee. Where was I, and how far
was I exiled from the delights of Thy house, in that sixteenth year
of the age of my flesh, when the madness of lust to the which human
shamelessness granteth full freedom, although forbidden by Thy
laws held complete away over me, and I resigned myself entirely to
it? Those about me meanwhile took no care to save me from ruin by
marriage, their sole care being that I should learn to make a powerful
speech, and become a persuasive orator.
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