nothing can be trivial, in a record of life so conceived.
And this point of view also helps the writer to keep all his details in
proportion; the autobiographer's usual fault, artistically at least,
being an inordinate valuation of small concerns, because they happened
to him. To St. Augustine, while not the smallest human event is without
significance, in its relation to eternity, not the greatest human event
is of importance, in its relation to time; and his own share in it would
but induce a special, it may seem an exaggerated, humility on his part.
Thus, speaking of his early studies, his triumphs in them, not without a
certain _naivete_: 'Whatever was written, either in rhetoric or logic,
geometry, music, and arithmetic, by myself without much difficulty or
any instruction, I understood, Thou knowest, O Lord my God; because both
quickness and understanding and acuteness in discerning is Thy gift.'
Or, again, speaking of the youthful excellences ('excellently hadst Thou
made him') of that son who was the son of his beloved mistress: 'I had
no part in that boy, but the sin.'

Intellectual pride, one sees in him indeed, at all times, by the very
force with which it is repressed into humility; and, in all that relates
to that mistress, in the famous cry: 'Give me chastity, but not yet!' in
all those insurgent memories of 'these various and shadowy loves,' we
see the force of the flesh, in one who lived always with so passionate a
life, alike of the spirit and the senses. Now, recalling what was sinful
in him, in his confessions to God, he is reluctant to allow any value to
the most honourable of human sentiments, to so much as forgive the most
estimable of human weaknesses. 'And now, Lord, in writing I confess it
unto Thee. Read it who will, and interpret it how he will: and if any
finds sin therein, that I wept my mother for a small portion of an hour
(the mother who for the time was dead to mine eyes, who had for many
years wept for me that I might live in Thine eyes), let him not deride
me; but rather, if he be one of large charity, let him weep for himself
for my sins unto Thee, the Father of all the brethren of Thy Christ.'
And yet it is of this mother that he writes his most tender, his most
beautiful pages. 'The day was now approaching whereon she was to depart
this life (which day Thou well knewest, we knew not), it came to pass,
Thyself, as I believe, by Thy secret ways so ordering it, that she and I
stood alo