licts, not
with an unfettered imagination, like Jerome in the wilderness, but with
positive sin. The evil that he would not, that he did, followed with
remorse and shame; still a slave to his senses, and perhaps to his
imagination, for though he had broken away from the materialism of the
Manicheans, he had not abandoned philosophy. He read the books of Plato,
which had a good effect, since he saw, what he had not seen before, that
true realities are purely intellectual, and that God, who occupies the
summit of the world of intelligence, is a pure spirit, inaccessible to
the senses; so that Platonism to him, in an important sense, was the
vestibule of Christianity. Platonism, the loftiest development of pagan
thought, however, did not emancipate him. He comprehended the Logos of
the Athenian sage; but he did not comprehend the Word made flesh, the
Word attached to the Cross. The mystery of the Incarnation offended his
pride of reason.

At length light beamed in upon him from another source, whose simplicity
he had despised. He read Saint Paul. No longer did the apostle's style
seem barbarous, as it did to Cardinal Bembo,--it was a fountain of life.
He was taught two things he had not read in the books of the
Platonists,--the lost state of man, and the need of divine grace. The
Incarnation appeared in a new light. Jesus Christ was revealed to him as
the restorer of fallen humanity.

He was now "rationally convinced." He accepted the theology of Saint
Paul; but he could not break away from his sins. And yet the awful
truths he accepted filled him with anguish, and produced dreadful
conflicts. The law of his members warred against the law of his mind. In
agonies he cried, "Oh, wretched man that I am! Who shall deliver me from
this body of death?" He shunned all intercourse. He withdrew to his
garden, reclined under a fig-tree, and gave vent to bitter tears. He
wrestled with the angel, and his deliverance was at hand. It was under
the fig-tree of his garden that he fancied he heard a voice of boy or
girl, he could not tell, chanting and often repeating, "Take up and
read; take up and read." He opened the Scriptures, and his eye alighted
not on the text which had converted Antony the monk, "Go and sell all
that thou hast and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in
heaven," but on this: "Let us walk honestly, as in the day, not in
rioting, drunkenness, and wantonness, but put ye on the Lord Jesus
Christ, and not m