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- 14 The Confessions of S. Augustine.
masters, but what the so-called grammarians taught me. For those first lessons, reading, writing, and arithmetic, I used to find no less burdensome and tasklike than all my Greek. And yet whence was this too, but from the sin and vanity of this life, because “I was but flesh, and a wind that passeth away and cometh not again”? (Ps. lxxviii. 39). For those first lessons were in fact better, because more certain; by them I obtained, and still retain, the power of reading what I find written, and myself writing what I will; whereas in the others, I was compelled to learn the wanderings of some Æneas or other, forgetful of my own and to weep for dead Dido, because she killed herself for love; the while, with dry eyes, I, most miserable, endured myself dying among these things, far from Thee, O God my life.
For what could be more miserable than a miserable being, who commiserates not himself, weeping the death of Dido which came of her love to Æneas, but weeping not his own death which came of want of love to Thee, O God, Thou light of my heart, Thou bread of my inmost soul, Thou Power who makest fertile my mind, and the thought of my bosom? I loved Thee not, I committed fornication against Thee, and all around me thus fornicating there echoed “Well done! well done!” “for the friendship of this world is fornication against Thee” (S. James iv. 4), and “Well done! well done!” is repeated till one is ashamed not to be thus a man. And all this I wept not, but I wept for Dido slain, and “seeking by the sword a wound extreme,” myself seeking the while the extremest and lowest of Thy creatures, having forsaken Thee, earth passing into the earth; and if forbid to read all this, I would grieve that I might not read what grieved me. Madness like this is reckoned a more honourable and a richer learning than that by which I learned to read and write.
But now, my God, cry Thou aloud in my soul; and let Thy truth tell me, “Not so, not so. Far better was that earlier lore.” For, lo, I would far more readily forget the wanderings of Æneas and all the rest than how to read and write. But over the thresholds of the Grammar Schools veils are hung; but these indicate not so much the dignity of secrecy as the cloak of errors. Let not those, whom I no longer fear, cry out against me, while I confess to Thee, my God, whatever my soul will, and acquiesce in the
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