" Today we"d call them a gang probably. I think we"d also say his upbringing was holding true that he was upset by their behavior and refused to take part in it.

             Augustine goes on to tell us of finding the work of Cicero, specifically, a work titled Hortensia, which Augustine tells us recommends that, "the reader study philosophy." He tells also that this work led him directly to his life-long search for eternal truth and a search for wisdom. This search led him to a surface study of Scriptures but he says they didn"t seem as grand as Cicero. Augustine goes on to tell the reader about his finding the Manicheans, group who claimed Christianity but had some very odd ideas as part of their "faith". It is worthy to note that at this point in the history of Christianity, there were literally hundreds of sects or cults, all with different interpretations of Scripture. (Rather like our own day and time.) It took some while after Augustine for the organization we know as the Catholic Church to first predominate and then become the sole acceptable expression of Christianity.

             This explanation of his life, between the ages of sixteen and twenty, leads to his telling about his mother, Monica, known as Saint Monica in some churches. Augustine from the perspective of ten or twelve years later, says of his mother and her influence:.

             But you sent down your help from above and rescued my soul from the depths of this darkness because my mother, your faithful servant wept to you for me, shedding more tears for my spiritual death than other mothers shed for the bodily death of a son. For in her faith and in the spirit which she had from you she looked on me as dead. You heard her and did not despise the tears that streamed down and watered the earth in every place she bowed her head in prayer. You heard her for how else can I explain the dream with which you consoled her, so that she agreed to live with me and eat at the same table in our home? Lately she had refused to do this, because she loathed and shunned the blasphemy of my false beliefs, (Augustine, pg.