These also my heart hated, though not with a perfect hatred: for
perchance I hated them more because I was to suffer by them, than
because they did things utterly unlawful. Of a truth such are base
persons, and they go a whoring from Thee, loving these fleeting
mockeries of things temporal, and filthy lucre, which fouls the hand
that grasps it; hugging the fleeting world, and despising Thee, Who
abidest, and recallest, and forgivest the adulteress soul of man, when
she returns to Thee. And now I hate such depraved and crooked persons,
though I love them if corrigible, so as to prefer to money the
learning which they acquire, and to learning, Thee, O God, the truth
and fulness of assured good, and most pure peace. But then I rather
for my own sake misliked them evil, than liked and wished them good
for Thine.
When therefore they of Milan had sent to Rome to the prefect of
the city, to furnish them with a rhetoric reader for their city, and
sent him at the public expense, I made application (through those very
persons, intoxicated with Manichaean vanities, to be freed wherefrom I
was to go, neither of us however knowing it) that Symmachus, then
prefect of the city, would try me by setting me some subject, and so
send me.
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