he felt a greater and greater
interest. He found, from what Ambrose said, that the objections by which
the Manichaeans had set him against the Gospel were all mistaken; and,
when Monica joined him, after he had been some time at Milan, she had
the delight of finding that he had given up the Manichaean sect, and was
once more a catechumen of the Church.

Augustine had still to fight his way through many difficulties. He had
learnt that the best and highest wisdom of the heathens could not
satisfy his mind and heart; and he now turned again to St. Paul's
epistles, and found that Scripture was something very different from
what he had supposed it to be in the pride of his youth. He was filled
with grief and shame on account of the vileness of his past life; and
these feelings were made still stronger by the accounts which a friend
gave him of the strict and self-denying ways of Antony and other monks.
One day, as he lay in the garden of his lodging, with his mind tossed to
and fro by anxious thoughts, so that he even wept in his distress, he
heard a voice, like that of a child, singing over and over "Take up and
read! take up and read!" At first he fancied that the voice came from
some child at play; but he could not think of any childish game in which
such words were used. And then he remembered how St. Antony had been
struck by the words of the Gospel which he heard in church;[31] and it
seemed to him that the voice, wherever it might come from, was a call of
the same kind to himself. So he eagerly seized the book of St. Paul's
Epistles, which was lying by him, and, as he opened it, the first words
on which his eyes fell were these,--"Let us walk honestly, as in the
day; not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness,
not in strife and envying; but put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make
not provision for the flesh, to fulfil the lusts thereof" (_Rom._ xiii.
13, 14). And, as he read, the words all at once sank deeply into his
heart, and from that moment he felt himself another man. As soon as he
could do so without being particularly noticed, he gave up his office of
professor and went into the country, where he spent some months in the
company of his mother and other friends; and at the following Easter
(A.D. 387), he was baptized by St. Ambrose. The good Monica had now seen
the desire of her heart fulfilled; and she soon after died in peace, as
she was on her way back to Africa, in company with her s