# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_December 1857_S375
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

The Lutheran-Theological Pastor's Library. 375

people sought their goal in monasticism. Surrounded on every side by heathen corruption, by the threatened downfall of their fatherland, by devastating wars with every conceivable atrocity, themselves long sunk in the glittering misery of their age, they sought rescue in renunciation of everything temporal, and rest in a quiet, contemplative life joined with labor. Augustine admired the heroic resolve of these people, and looked with contrition upon his own softness and with shame upon his many years of study, which had brought him not a step nearer to the truth. With all his pain he cast himself down alone before God, and urgently, as one sinking in a torrent cries to the rescuer on the bank, his soul cried out for grace and light. A wondrous voice testified to him of his acceptance. Often it repeated itself in the solitary garden. The pondering hearer was certain that it sounded to him from without, that it was not merely a holy exaltation growing loud within himself; nor could he take it for the voice of a man. (If it does not send a shudder through you, like a word out of a world that lies beyond the grave and beyond our mortality, then I do not care to dispute with you.) That it was sent from God its effect showed: Augustine was saved, and saved more gloriously than he and his mother had ever hoped. He was not only a redeemed and sanctified man; in a moment he renounced everything that the world offers even of what is permitted; he felt that he must become the Lord's wholly, without hanging any longer on any earthly bond. The sign given him by God was not only the surety of his acceptance, it was at the same time the call to a life which was to establish and defend the kingdom of Christ with apostolic power, even though only after years, and without his desiring it, was he actually led into this calling, for which the time preceding his conversion had to serve as preparatory exercise. (Eighth book.)“

„Augustine was baptized at Milan at Eastertide of the year 387, being 33 years old, after he had prepared himself for half a year with his friends, in his mother's company, in rural seclusion, and at the beginning of Lent had presented himself in Milan in order to enter the number of those catechumens who did not merely take part in the church as guests and undecided apprentices, but who desired actual entrance and were examined and prepared for it. Now the little holy company desired and longed for their homeland, in order to live there for the Lord in quietness. Before the embarkation Monica died at Ostia on the Tiber. (Ninth book.)“

„In the tenth book Augustine examines the condition of his converted heart, and, now that the web of his sins is torn, traces with keen conscientiousness the several threads of it that run out into his heart. So far go his Confessions; they are accordingly the history of his errors and of his conversion. What followed upon them lay open before the eyes of the world, and brought it a hundredfold fruit.“