Signs of the Times  

   ....He went to Carthage Univ. to study to become a rhetorician.  During is studies he came across a book by Cicero about the pursuit of wisdom, and this made him dissatisfied rhetoric, the art of making the worse appear the better reason.  Cicero's book, now lost, changed the course of Augustine's life.  He turned to the Bible but was repelled by what he saw as the vulgarity of its style and also bythe questionable morality of much that it contained.  After that, Augustine explored the Manichean philosophy, which taught that the human body was in itself evil.  He found this too unsatisfactory, as he did the philosophy of Plato.  He even dipped into astrology.
     When he was 29, Augustine went to Rome, then two years later to Milan, where he fell under the spell of the great Ambrose, whomhe heard preach evey Sunday.  Ambrose gradually overcame the various bjections that Augustine had felt towards Christianity.  As he gradually became converted, the immorality of his lifestyle dawned on him and he became deeply depressed.  In the end, he flung himself down under a fig tree, sobbing, "Why not now?  Why not make this the end of my vile behavior?"  He seemed to hear a voice: 'Take and read.'  He took up the bible and opened it at random.  His eyes fell on the passage, "Not in rioting, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife nor in envy.."  He followed the instruction to go with Christ.
      Augustine was baptized in 386, became a priest at Hippo in 391 and bishop in 395.  He became a reformed character, turning his house into a monastery.  He eventually died on 28 August in 430 A.D.  The volatile and mercurial Augustine wrote prolifically, his essays fill 11 volumes.  Probably no other writer has had more influence on the development of Christian doctrine than Augustine.  Where his teacher, Ambrose moved the minds of his hearers; Augustine moved their hearts.  For hundreds of years, he was the doinant influence on the West.  Even in the Reformation, Protestants turned to Augustine's writings for justification.  They were where Calvin found his doctrine of predestination.  The intensely personal and passionate nature of the "Confessions," easily the best known of his works, explains why it remains one of the springs of Christian devotional life right up to the present day.   It powerfully describes a man struggling to come to terms with the raw frailties of his human nature.

     Lord,