acquaintance with the human heart, as well as
evangelical truth; not an egotistical parade of morbid sentimentalities,
like the "Confessions" of Rousseau, but a mirror of Christian
experience,--tells us that until he was sixteen he was obstinate, lazy,
neglectful of his studies, indifferent to reproach, and abandoned to
heathenish sports. He even committed petty thefts, was quarrelsome, and
indulged in demoralizing pleasures. At nineteen he was sent to Carthage
to be educated, where he went still further astray; was a follower of
stage-players (then all but infamous), and gave himself up to unholy
loves. But his intellect was inquiring, his nature genial, and his
habits as studious as could be reconciled with a life of pleasure,--a
sort of Alcibiades, without his wealth and rank, willing to listen to
any Socrates who would stimulate his mind. With all his excesses and
vanities, he was not frivolous, and seemed at an early age to be a
sincere inquirer after truth. The first work which had a marked effect
on him was the "Hortensius" of Cicero,--a lost book, which contained an
eloquent exhortation to philosophy, or the love of wisdom. From that he
turned to the Holy Scriptures, but they seemed to him then very poor,
compared with the stateliness of Tully, nor could his sharp wit
penetrate their meaning. Those who seemed to have the greatest influence
over him were the Manicheans,--a transcendental, oracular, indefinite,
illogical, pretentious set of philosophers, who claimed superior wisdom,
and were not unlike (at least in spirit) those modern _savans_ in the
Christian commonwealth, who make a mockery of what is most sacred in
Christianity while themselves propounding the most absurd theories.

The Manicheans claimed to be a Christian sect, but were Oriental in
their origin and Pagan in their ideas. They derived their doctrines from
Manes, or Mani, who flourished in Persia in the second half of the third
century, and who engrafted some Christian doctrines on his system, which
was essentially the dualism of Zoroaster and the pantheism of Buddha. He
assumed two original substances,--God and Hyle, light and darkness,
good and evil,--which were opposed to each other. Matter, which is
neither good nor evil, was regarded as bad in itself, and identified
with darkness, the prince of which overthrew the primitive man. Among
the descendants of the fallen man light and darkness have struggled for
supremacy, but matter, or darkness,