he might be baptized, and preparations were made for the
purpose; but all at once he began to grow better, and the baptism was
put off for the same reason as before.

As he grew up, he gave but little promise of what he was afterwards to
become. Much of his time was spent in idleness; and through idleness he
fell into bad company, and was drawn into sins of many kinds. When he
was about seventeen, his father died. The good Monica had been much
troubled by her husband's heathenism and misconduct, and had earnestly
tried to convert him from his errors. She went about this wisely, not
lecturing him or arguing with him in a way that might have set him more
against the Gospel, but trying rather to show him the beauty of
Christian faith by her own loving, gentle, and dutiful behaviour. And at
length her pains were rewarded by seeing him before his death profess
himself a believer, and receive Christian baptism.

Monica was left rather badly off at her husband's death. But a rich
neighbour was kind enough to help her in the expense of finishing her
son's education, and the young man himself now began to show something
of the great talents which God had been pleased to bestow on him.
Unhappily, however, he sank deeper and deeper in vice, and poor Monica
was bitterly grieved by his ways. A book which he happened to read led
him to feel something of the shamefulness and wretchedness of his
courses; but, as it was a heathen book (although written by one of the
wisest of the heathens, Cicero), it could not show him by what means he
might be able to reach to a higher life. He looked into Scripture, in
the hope of finding instruction there; but he was now in that state of
mind to which, as St. Paul says (1 _Cor._ i. 23), the preaching of
Christ sounds like "foolishness;" so that he fancied himself to be above
learning anything from a book so plain and homely as the Bible then
seemed to him, and he set out in search of some other teaching. And a
very strange sort of teaching he met with.

About a hundred years before this time, a man named Manes appeared in
Persia (A.D. 270), and preached a religion which he pretended to have
received from Heaven, but which was really made up by himself, from a
mixture of Christian and heathen notions. It was something like the
doctrines which had been before taught by the Gnostics,[30] and was as
wild nonsense as can well be imagined. He taught that there were two
gods--a good god of light, and a