Confessions by Augustine of Hippo

Author:Augustine of Hippo
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141916552
Publisher: Penguin Group USA, Inc.
Published: 2010-10-25T04:00:00+00:00

3

Vercundus was wearing himself out with worry over our newfound blessings. As he saw it, because of his own ties, which still bound him fast, he was deprived of our company. He was not yet a Christian, but it was his Christian wife who proved the strongest tie of all and he was kept, for the present, from taking the course which we had set ourselves, because he always said that he would not be a Christian except in the very way that was not open to him. All the same he kindly offered to allow us to stay in his country house for as long as we needed. You will surely repay him for his goodness, O Lord, when the just are given their reward, since you have already awarded him the lot of the just. For after our departure, when we were at Rome, he fell ill and died, but not before he had been received into the Church on his sick-bed. In this you had mercy not only on him but also on us, for the memory of the extreme kindness which he showed us as our friend would have tormented us with unbearable sorrow, if we had not known that he was one of your flock. We thank you for this, you who are our God. We are yours. We know it from the charges you lay upon us and the consolations you give. You are faithful to your promises, and for his country house at Cassiciacum, where we found rest in you, far from the world and its troubles, you are repaying Verecundus with the contentment of your paradise, where nothing ever fades away. For in your mountain, your fruitful mountain that is rich like butter,1 you have forgiven him his sins upon earth.

But while Verecundus suffered these torments, Nebridius shared our joy. Before he was a Christian he, like us, had been caught in the pitfall of the most deadly error and had refused to believe in the reality of the Truth incarnate, the body of your Son. But he had now struggled free and although he had not yet received any of the sacraments of your Church, he was most persistent in his search for the truth. Not long after we had been converted and born again in your baptism you freed him from this life. By then he too had become a faithful Catholic. He served you in perfect chastity and continence at home in Africa with his family, for through him his whole household had been made Christian. Now he lives in Abraham's bosom, and whatever may be the meaning of that bosom, there, Nebridius lives, my very dear friend, taken by you to be your son, no longer simply one whom you had freed from bondage. There he lives. For what other place is there for a soul such as his? There he lives, in that very place about which he used to question me so much, poor ignorant man that I was.

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