is not so much the sign of a covering for a mystery as a curtain 
for error.  Let them exclaim against me -- those I no longer fear 
-- while I confess to thee, my God, what my soul desires, and let 
me find some rest, for in blaming my own evil ways I may come to 
love thy holy ways.  Neither let those cry out against me who buy 
and sell the baubles of literature.  For if I ask them if it is 
true, as the poet says, that Aeneas once came to Carthage, the 
unlearned will reply that they do not know and the learned will 
deny that it is true.  But if I ask with what letters the name 
Aeneas is written, all who have ever learned this will answer 
correctly, in accordance with the conventional understanding men 
have agreed upon as to these signs.  Again, if I should ask which 
would cause the greatest inconvenience in our life, if it were 
forgotten: reading and writing, or these poetical fictions, who 
does not see what everyone would answer who had not entirely lost 
his own memory?  I erred, then, when as a boy I preferred those 
vain studies to these more profitable ones, or rather loved the 
one and hated the other.  "One and one are two, two and two are 
four": this was then a truly hateful song to me.  But the wooden 
horse full of its armed soldiers, and the holocaust of Troy, and 
the spectral image of Creusa were all a most delightful -- and 
vain -- show![28]

     23.  But why, then, did I dislike Greek learning, which was 
full of such tales?  For Homer was skillful in inventing such 
poetic fictions and is most sweetly wanton; yet when I was a boy, 
he was most disagreeable to me.  I believe that Virgil would have 
the same effect on Greek boys as Homer did on me if they were 
forced to learn him.  For the tedium of learning a foreign 
language mingled gall into the sweetness of those Grecian myths.  
For I did not understand a word of the language, and yet I was 
driven with threats and cruel punishments to learn it.  There was 
also a time when, as an infant, I knew no Latin; but this I 
acquired without any fear or tormenting, but merely by being alert 
to the blandishments of my nurses, the jests of those who smiled 
on me, and the sportiveness of those who toyed with me.  I learned 
all this, indeed, without being urged by any pressure of 
punishment, for my own heart urged me to bring forth its own 
fashioning, which I could not do except by learning words: not 
from those who taught me but those who talked to me, into whose 
ears I could pour forth whatever I could fashion.  From this it is 
sufficiently clear that a free curiosity is more effective in 
learning than a discipline based on fear.  Yet, by thy ordinance, 
O God, discipline is given to restrain the excesses of freedom; 
this ranges from the ferule of the schoolmaster to the trials of 
the martyr and has the effect of mingling for us a wholesome 
bitterness, which calls us back to thee from the poisonous 
pleasures that first drew us from thee.

                          CHAPTER XV

     24.  Hear my prayer, O Lord; let not my soul faint under thy 
discipline, nor let me faint in confessing unto thee thy mercies, 
whereby thou hast saved me from all my most wicked ways till thou 
shouldst become sweet to me beyond all the allurements that I used 
to follow.  Let me come to love thee wholly, and grasp thy hand 
with my whole heart that thou mayest deliver me from every 
temptation, even unto the last.  And thus, O Lord, my King and my 
God, may all things useful that I learned as a boy now be offered 
in thy service -- let it be that for thy service I now speak and 
write and reckon.  For when I was learning vain things, thou didst 
impose thy discipline upon me: and thou hast forgiven me my sin of 
delighting in those vanities.  In those studies I learned many a 
useful word, but these might have been learned in matters not so 
vain; and surely that is the safe way for youths to walk in.

                          CHAPTER XVI

     25.  But woe unto you, O torrent of human custom!  Who shall 
stay your course?  When will you ever run dry?  How long will you 
carry down the sons of Eve into that vast and hideous ocean, which 
even those who have the Tree (for an ark)[29] can scarcely pass 
over?  Do I not read in you the stories of Jove the thunderer -- 
and the adulterer?[30]  How could he be both?  But so it says, and 
the sham thunder served as a cloak for him to play at real 
adultery.  Yet which of our gowned masters will give a tempered 
hearing to a man trained in their own schools who cries out and 
says: "These were Homer's fictions; he transfers things human to 
the gods.  I could have wished that he would transfer divine 
things to us."[31]  But it would have been more true if he said, 
"These are, indeed, his fictions, but he attributed divine 
attributes to sinful men, that crimes might not be accounted 
crimes, and that whoever committed such crimes might appear to 
imitate the celestial gods and not abandoned men."

     26.  And yet, O torrent of hell, the sons of men are still 
cast into you, and they pay fees for learning all these things.  
And much is made of it when this goes on in the forum under the 
auspices of laws which give a salary over and above the fees.  And 
you beat against your rocky shore and roar: "Here words may be 
learned; here you can attain the eloquence which is so necessary 
to persuade people to your way of thinking; so helpful in 
unfolding your opinions." Verily, they seem to argue that we 
should never have understood these words, "golden shower," 
"bosom," "intrigue," "highest heavens," and other such words, if 
Terence had not introduced a good-for-nothing youth upon the 
stage, setting up a picture of Jove as his example of lewdness and 
telling the tale

          "Of Jove's descending in a golden shower