threatenest vast misery?  Is it, then, a trifling sorrow not to 
love thee?  It is not so to me.  Tell me, by thy mercy, O Lord, my 
God, what thou art to me.  "Say to my soul, I am your 
salvation."[14]  So speak that I may hear.  Behold, the ears of my 
heart are before thee, O Lord; open them and "say to my soul, I am 
your salvation." I will hasten after that voice, and I will lay 
hold upon thee.  Hide not thy face from me.  Even if I die, let me 
see thy face lest I die.

     6.  The house of my soul is too narrow for thee to come in to 
me; let it be enlarged by thee.  It is in ruins; do thou restore 
it.  There is much about it which must offend thy eyes; I confess 
and know it.  But who will cleanse it?  Or, to whom shall I cry 
but to thee?  "Cleanse thou me from my secret faults," O Lord, 
"and keep back thy servant from strange sins."[15]  "I believe, 
and therefore do I speak."[16]  But thou, O Lord, thou knowest.  
Have I not confessed my transgressions unto thee, O my God; and 
hast thou not put away the iniquity of my heart?[17]  I do not 
contend in judgment with thee,[18] who art truth itself; and I 
would not deceive myself, lest my iniquity lie even to itself.  I 
do not, therefore, contend in judgment with thee, for "if thou, 
Lord, shouldst mark iniquities, O Lord, who shall stand?"[19]

                          CHAPTER VI

     7.  Still, dust and ashes as I am, allow me to speak before 
thy mercy.  Allow me to speak, for, behold, it is to thy mercy 
that I speak and not to a man who scorns me.  Yet perhaps even 
thou mightest scorn me; but when thou dost turn and attend to me, 
thou wilt have mercy upon me.  For what do I wish to say, O Lord 
my God, but that I know not whence I came hither into this life-
in-death.  Or should I call it death-in-life?  I do not know.  And 
yet the consolations of thy mercy have sustained me from the very 
beginning, as I have heard from my fleshly parents, from whom and 
in whom thou didst form me in time -- for I cannot myself 
remember.  Thus even though they sustained me by the consolation 
of woman's milk, neither my mother nor my nurses filled their own 
breasts but thou, through them, didst give me the food of infancy 
according to thy ordinance and thy bounty which underlie all 
things.  For it was thou who didst cause me not to want more than 
thou gavest and it was thou who gavest to those who nourished me 
the will to give me what thou didst give them.  And they, by an 
instinctive affection, were willing to give me what thou hadst 
supplied abundantly.  It was, indeed, good for them that my good 
should come through them, though, in truth, it was not from them 
but by them.  For it is from thee, O God, that all good things 
come -- and from my God is all my health.  This is what I have 
since learned, as thou hast made it abundantly clear by all that I 
have seen thee give, both to me and to those around me.  For even 
at the very first I knew how to suck, to lie quiet when I was 
full, and to cry when in pain -- nothing more.

     8.  Afterward I began to laugh -- at first in my sleep, then 
when waking.  For this I have been told about myself and I believe 
it -- though I cannot remember it -- for I see the same things in 
other infants.  Then, little by little, I realized where I was and 
wished to tell my wishes to those who might satisfy them, but I 
could not!  For my wants were inside me, and they were outside, 
and they could not by any power of theirs come into my soul.  And 
so I would fling my arms and legs about and cry, making the few 
and feeble gestures that I could, though indeed the signs were not 
much like what I inwardly desired and when I was not satisfied -- 
either from not being understood or because what I got was not 
good for me -- I grew indignant that my elders were not subject to 
me and that those on whom I actually had no claim did not wait on 
me as slaves -- and I avenged myself on them by crying.  That 
infants are like this, I have myself been able to learn by 
watching them; and they, though they knew me not, have shown me 
better what I was like than my own nurses who knew me.

     9.  And, behold, my infancy died long ago, but I am still 
living.  But thou, O Lord, whose life is forever and in whom 
nothing dies -- since before the world was, indeed, before all 
that can be called "before," thou wast, and thou art the God and 
Lord of all thy creatures; and with thee abide all the stable 
causes of all unstable things, the unchanging sources of all 
changeable things, and the eternal reasons of all non-rational and 
temporal things -- tell me, thy suppliant, O God, tell me, O 
merciful One, in pity tell a pitiful creature whether my infancy 
followed yet an earlier age of my life that had already passed 
away before it.  Was it such another age which I spent in my 
mother's womb?  For something of that sort has been suggested to 
me, and I have myself seen pregnant women.  But what, O God, my 
Joy, preceded _that_ period of life?  Was I, indeed, anywhere, or 
anybody?  No one can explain these things to me, neither father 
nor mother, nor the experience of others, nor my own memory.  Dost 
thou laugh at me for asking such things?  Or dost thou command me 
to praise and confess unto thee only what I know?

     10.  I give thanks to thee, O Lord of heaven and earth, 
giving praise to thee for that first being and my infancy of which 
I have no memory.  For thou hast granted to man that he should 
come to self-knowledge through the knowledge of others, and that 
he should believe many things about himself on the authority of 
the womenfolk.  Now, clearly, I had life and being; and, as my 
infancy closed, I was already learning signs by which my feelings 
could be communicated to others.

     Whence could such a creature come but from thee, O Lord?  Is 
any man skillful enough to have fashioned himself?  Or is there