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year, having achieved proficiency in rhetoric, he was recalled to philosophy by Cicero. He tried reading the Bible, but found it lacking in Ciceronian dignity. It was at this time that he became a Manichæan, which grieved his mother. By profession he was a teacher of rhetoric. He was addicted to astrology, to which, in later life, he was averse, because it teaches that 'the inevitable cause of thy sin is in the sky'.18 He read philosophy, so far as it could be read in Latin; he mentions particularly Aristotle's Ten Categories, which, he says, he understood without the help of a teacher. 'And what did it profit me, that I, the vilest slave of evil passions, read by myself all the books of so-called "liberal" arts, and understood whatever I could read? … For I had my back to the light, and my face to the things enlightened; whence my face … itself was not enlightened.'19 At this time he believed that God was a vast and bright body, and he himself a part of that body. One could wish that he had told in detail the tenets of the Manichæans, instead of merely saying they were erroneous.

It is interesting that St Augustine's first reasons for rejecting the doctrines of Manichæus were scientific. He remembered—so he tells us20—what he had learned of astronomy from the writings of the best astronomers, 'and I compared them with the sayings of Manichæus, who in his crazy folly has written much and copiously upon these subjects; but none of his reasoning of the solstices, nor equinoxes, nor eclipses, nor whatever of this kind I had learned in books of secular philosophy, was satisfactory to me. But I was commanded to believe; and yet it corresponded not with reasonings obtained by calculations, and by my own observations, but was quite contrary.' He is careful to point out that scientific mistakes are not in themselves a sign of errors as to the faith, but only become so when delivered with an air of authority as known through divine inspiration. One wonders what he would have thought if he had lived in the time of Galileo.

In the hope of resolving his doubts, a Manichæan bishop named Faustus, reputed the most learned member of the sect, met him and reasoned with him. But 'I found him first utterly ignorant of liberal sciences, save grammar, and that but in an ordinary way. But because he had read some of Tully's Orations, a very few books of Seneca, some things of the poets, and such few

volumes of his own sect, as were written in Latin and in logical order, and was daily practised in speaking, he acquired a certain eloquence, which proved the more pleasing and seductive, because under the control of his good sense, and with a certain natural grace.'21

He found Faustus quite unable to solve his astronomical difficulties. The books of the Manichæans, he tells us, 'are full of lengthy fables, of the heaven, and stars, sun, and moon', which do not agree with what has been discovered by astronomers; but when he questioned Faustus on these matters, Faustus frankly confessed his ignorance. 'Even for this I liked him the better. For the modesty of a candid mind is even more attractive than the knowledge of those things which I desired; and such I found him, in all the more difficult and subtle questions.'22

This sentiment is surprisingly liberal; one would not have expected it in that age. Nor is it quite in harmony with St Augustine's later attitude towards heretics.

At this time he decided to go to Rome, not, he says, because there the income of a teacher was higher than at Carthage, but because he had heard that classes were more orderly. At Carthage, the disorders perpetrated by students were such that teaching was almost impossible; but at Rome, while there was less disorder, students fraudulently evaded payment.

In Rome, he still associated with the Manichæans, but with less conviction of their rightness. He began to think that the Academics were right in holding that men ought to doubt everything.23 He still, however, agreed with the Manichæans in thinking 'that it is not we ourselves that sin, but that some other nature (what,