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| Professing Rhetoric at Rome, He Discovers the Fraud of His Scholars.
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Chapter XII.—Professing Rhetoric
at Rome, He Discovers the Fraud of His Scholars.
22. Then began I assiduously to practise that
for which I came to Rome—the teaching of rhetoric; and first to
bring together at my home some to whom, and through whom, I had
begun to be known; when, behold, I learnt that other offences were
committed in Rome which I had not to bear in Africa. For those
subvertings by abandoned young men were not practised here, as I
had been informed; yet, suddenly, said they, to evade paying their
master’s fees, many of the youths conspire together, and remove
themselves to another,—breakers of faith, who, for the love of
money, set a small value on justice. These also my heart
“hated,” though not with a “perfect hatred;”424
for,
perhaps, I hated them more in that I was to suffer by them, than
for the illicit acts they committed. Such of a truth are base
persons, and they are unfaithful to Thee, loving these transitory
mockeries of temporal things, and vile gain, which begrimes the
hand that lays hold on it; and embracing the fleeting world, and
scorning Thee, who abidest, and invitest to return, and pardonest
the prostituted human soul when it returneth to Thee. And now I
hate such crooked and perverse men, although I love them if they
are to be corrected so as to prefer the learning they obtain to
money, and to learning Thee, O God, the truth and fulness of
certain good and most chaste peace. But then was the wish stronger
in me for my own sake not to suffer them evil, than was the wish
that they should become good for Thine.
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