# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_December 1857_S372
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

372 The Lutheran-Theological Pastor's Library.

heathen, took no care for the salvation of the souls of his three children — our Augustine, a second son named Navigius, and a daughter. But the mother Monica made up for what the father neglected. She was a pious Christian, and Augustine says of her that she bore her children spiritually with more pain than she had borne them bodily. Here too the Lord would show, as once in the case of Samuel and John, what a godly mother is to her children, who offers them the first of all human love and gently and prudently guides them to the eternal love of the Lord. Amid Augustine's missteps and errors, on into his years of manhood, she did not cease to admonish him and to pray for him; his resistance only showed her love in fuller light. And her persevering faithfulness was not in vain; she won the richly gifted son for the Lord, and then died joyfully like Hannah and Simeon, for her heart had seen the Savior in her son's heart. Three and thirty years her love's sorrow over the son endured; she had borne him in the 23rd year of her life and died 56 years old. Her husband too she had won; he died a believing Christian. — In the Confessions concerning his childhood Augustine already shows himself the deep searcher of the human heart, and finds sin already in his earliest youth. The father wished to make a famous man of him and spent almost beyond his means on his scholarly education. In his boyhood years the son was held very strictly by his teachers; instead of love he felt the dry rod, and instead of to faith he was reared by them to vanity; but his ambition was often kept from learning by a boyish love of play. At the end of his boyhood years his parents put him into the school in neighboring Madaura, from which he returned home in his sixteenth year gone wild, where he ran about for a year in all sorts of wantonness and was to prepare himself for the high school in Carthage. — (First and second book of the Confessions.)“

„At this time his father died. In Carthage the youth let himself be drawn into the excesses of the utterly unbridled students, though with inward resistance, and sank early into voluptuousness. In his nineteenth year, through a writing of Cicero, his taste for the more serious sciences was won, and he now began to seek after truth, but fell into the ruinous sect of the Manichaeans, who gave out their fantastic follies as a wisdom higher than the evangelical, and under the cloak of the strictest renunciation only sinned the more brazenly. The mother was inconsolable over her son's aberrations, but he neglected her admonitions as though they were only the words of womanish weakness. The Bible too seemed to him repugnant, as it seems to everyone who looks into it with a worldly mind. After a five-year stay, richly laden with knowledge and vanity but with a peaceless heart, the one-and-twenty-year-old youth returned to Thagaste and there gave instruction in the fine arts. The distressed mother was comforted by a dream-vision which after 12 years