mind is even more attractive than the knowledge of those things which I desired; and such I
found him, in all the more difficult and subtle questions." *
This sentiment is surprisingly liberal; one would not have expected it in that age. Nor is it quite
in harmony with Saint Augustine's later attitude towards heretics.
At this time he decided to go to Rome, not, he says, because there the income of a teacher was
higher than at Carthage, but because he had heard that classes were more orderly. At Carthage,
the disorders perpetrated by students were such that teaching was almost impossible; but at
Rome, while there was less disorder, students fraudulently evaded payment.
In Rome, he still associated with the Manichæans, but with less conviction of their rightness.
He began to think that the Academics were right in holding that men ought to doubt everything.
†He still, however, agreed with the Manichæans in thinking "that it is not we ourselves that
sin, but that some other nature (what, I know not) sins in us," and he believed Evil to be some
kind of substance. This makes it clear that, before as after his conversion, the question of sin
preoccupied him.
After about a year in Rome, he was sent to Milan by the Prefect Symmachus, in response to a
request from that city for a teacher of rhetoric. At Milan he became acquainted with Ambrose,
"known to the whole world as among the best of men." He came to love Ambrose for his
kindness, and to prefer the Catholic doctrine to that of the Manichæans; but for a while he was
held back by the scepticism he had learnt from the Academics, "to which philosophers
notwithstanding, because they were without the saving name of Christ, I utterly refused to
commit the care of my sick soul." ‡
In Milan he was joined by his mother, who had a powerful influence in hastening the last steps
to his conversion. She was a very earnest Catholic, and he writes of her always in a tone of
reverence. She was the more important to him at this time, because Ambrose was too busy to
converse with him privately.
* Confessions, Bk. II, Ch. VII.â
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Ibid., Bk. V, Ch. X.â
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¡Ibid., Bk. V, Ch. XIV.