I WILL now call to mind my past foulness, and the carnal corruptions
of my soul; not because I love them, but that I may love Thee,
O my God. For love of Thy love I do it; reviewing my most wicked
ways in the very bitterness of my remembrance, that Thou mayest
grow sweet unto me (Thou sweetness never failing, Thou blissful
and assured sweetness); and gathering me again out of that my
dissipation, wherein I was torn piecemeal, while turned from Thee,
the One Good, I lost myself among a multiplicity of things. For
I even burnt in my youth heretofore, to be satiated in things
below; and I dared to grow wild again, with these various and
shadowy loves: my beauty consumed away, and I stank in Thine eyes;
pleasing myself, and desirous to please in the eyes of men.
And what was it that I delighted in, but to love, and be loved?
but I kept not the measure of love, of mind to mind, friendship's
bright boundary: but out of the muddy concupiscence of the flesh,
and the bubblings of youth, mists fumed up which beclouded and
overcast my heart, that I could not discern the clear brightness
of love from the fog of lustfulness. Both did confusedly boil
in me, and hurried my unstayed youth over the precipice of unholy
desires, and sunk me in a gulf of flagitiousnesses. Thy wrath
had gathered over me, and I knew it not. I was grown deaf by the
clanking of the chain of my mortality, the punishment of the pride
of my soul, and I strayed further from Thee, and Thou lettest
me alone, and I was tossed about, and wasted, and dissipated,
and I boiled over in my fornications, and Thou heldest Thy peace,
O Thou my tardy joy! Thou then heldest Thy peace, and I wandered
further and further from Thee, into more and more fruitless seed-plots
of sorrows, with a proud dejectedness, and a restless weariness.
Oh! that some one had then attempered my disorder, and turned
to account the fleeting beauties of these, the extreme points
of Thy creation! had put a bound to their pleasureableness, that
so the tides of my youth might have cast themselves upon the marriage
shore, if they could not be calmed, and kept within the object
of a family, as Thy law prescribes, O Lord: who this way formest
the offspring of this our death, being able with a gentle hand
to blunt the thorns which were excluded from Thy paradise? For
Thy omnipotency is not far from us, even when we be far from Thee.
Else ought I more watchfully to have heeded the voice from the
clouds: Nevertheless such shall have trouble in the flesh, but
I spare you. And it is good for a man not to touch a woman. And,
he that is unmarried thinketh of the things of the Lord, how he
may please the Lord; but he that is married careth for the things
of this world, how he may please his wife.