Bad Advertisement?
Are you a Christian?
Online Store:Visit Our Store
| Stricken with Exceeding Grief, He Remembers the Dissolute Passions in Which, in His Sixteenth Year, He Used to Indulge.
PREVIOUS SECTION - NEXT SECTION - HELP 
Chapter II.—Stricken with
Exceeding Grief, He Remembers the Dissolute Passions in Which, in
His Sixteenth Year, He Used to Indulge.
2. But what was it that I delighted in save to
love and to be beloved? But I held it not in moderation, mind to
mind, the bright path of friendship, but out of the dark
concupiscence of the flesh and the effervescence of youth
exhalations came forth which obscured and overcast my heart, so
that I was unable to discern pure affection from unholy desire.
Both boiled confusedly within me, and dragged away my unstable
youth into the rough places of unchaste desires, and plunged me
into a gulf of infamy. Thy anger had overshadowed me, and I knew it
not. I was become deaf by the rattling of the chains of my
mortality, the punishment for my soul’s pride; and I wandered
farther from Thee, and Thou didst “suffer”188
me; and I was tossed to and fro,
and wasted, and poured out, and boiled over in my fornications, and
Thou didst hold Thy peace, O Thou my tardy joy! Thou then didst
hold Thy peace, and I wandered still farther from Thee, into more
and more barren seed-plots of sorrows, with proud dejection and
restless lassitude.
3. Oh for one to have regulated my disorder,
and turned to my profit the fleeting beauties of the things around
me, and fixed a bound to their sweetness, so that the tides of my
youth might have spent themselves upon the conjugal shore, if so be
they could not be tranquillized and satisfied within the object of
a family, as Thy law appoints, O Lord,—who thus formest the
offspring of our death, being able also with a tender hand to blunt
the thorns which were excluded from Thy paradise! For Thy
omnipotency is not far from us even when we are far from Thee, else
in truth ought I more vigilantly to have given heed to the voice
from the clouds: “Nevertheless, such shall have trouble in the
flesh, but I spare you;”189
and, “It is good for a man not to
touch a woman;”190
and, “He
that is unmarried careth for the things that belong to the Lord,
how he may please the Lord; but he that is married careth for the
things that are of the world, how he may please his wife.”191
I should,
therefore, have listened more attentively to these words, and,
being severed “for the kingdom of heaven’s sake,”192
I would with
greater happiness have expected Thy embraces.
4. But I, poor fool, seethed as does the sea,
and, forsaking Thee, followed the violent course of my own stream,
and exceeded all Thy limitations; nor did I escape Thy scourges.193
For what
mortal can do so? But Thou wert always by me, mercifully angry, and
dashing with the bitterest vexations all my illicit pleasures, in
order that I might seek pleasures free from vexation. But where I
could meet with such except in Thee, O Lord, I could not
find,—except in Thee, who teachest by sorrow,194
and woundest us to heal us, and killest us that
we may not die from Thee.195
Where was I, and how far was I
exiled from the delights of Thy house, in that sixteenth year of
the age of my flesh, when the madness of lust—to the which human
shamelessness granteth full freedom, although forbidden by Thy
laws—held complete sway over me, and I resigned myself entirely
to it? Those about me meanwhile took no care to save me from ruin
by marriage, their sole care being that I should learn to make a
powerful speech, and become a persuasive orator.
E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
|
