" For "an infant cannot
endure a companion to feed with him in a fountain of milk which is richly
abounding and overflowing, although that companion be wholly destitute,
and can take no other food but that." This is the Original Sin,
inherited, innate, unacquired; for this are "babes span-long" to suffer,
as the famous or infamous preacher declared. "Where, or at what time,
was I ever innocent?" he cries, and hears no answer from "the dark
backward and abysm" of the pre-natal life.
Then the Saint describes a child's learning to speak; how he amasses
verbal tokens of things, "having tamed, and, as it were, broken my mouth
to the pronouncing of them." "And so I began to launch out more deeply
into the tempestuous traffique and society of mankind." Tempestuous
enough he found or made it--this child of a Pagan father and a Christian
saint, Monica, the saint of Motherhood. The past generations had
"chalked out certain laborious ways of learning," and, perhaps, Saint
Augustine never forgave the flogging pedagogue--the _plagosus Orbilius_
of his boyhood. Long before his day he had found out that the sorrows of
children, and their joys, are no less serious than the sorrows of mature
age. "Is there, Lord, any man of so great a mind that he can think
lightly of those racks, and hooks, and other torments, for the avoiding
whereof men pray unto Thee with great fear from one end of the world to
the other, as that he can make sport at such as doe most sharply inflict
these things upon them, as our parents laughed at the torments which we
children susteyned at our master's hands?" Can we suppose that Monica
laughed, or was it only the heathen father who approved of "roughing it?"
"Being yet a childe, I began to beg Thy ayde and succour; and I did
loosen the knots of my tongue in praying Thee; and I begged, being yet a
little one, with no little devotion, that I might not be beaten at the
schoole.
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