And still your faithful mercy hovered over me from afar. In what shameful iniquities I wore myself out, following a sacrilegious curiosity, which, having deserted you, then began to drag me down into the treacherous abyss, into the beguiling obedience of devils, to whom I made offerings of my wicked deeds. And still in all this you did not fail to scourge me. I dared, even while your solemn rites were being celebrated inside the walls of your church, to desire and to plan a project which merited death as its fruit. For this you chastised me with grievous punishments, but nothing in comparison with my fault, you my greatest mercy,⁠a my God, my refuge from those terrible dangers in which I wandered with stiff neck, receding farther from you, loving my own ways and not yours—loving a vagrant liberty!
Those studies I was then pursuing, generally regarded as respectable, were aimed at distinction in the courts of law—and in these, the more crafty I was, the more I would be praised. Such is the blindness of men that they even glory in their blindness. And by this time I had become a master in the School of Rhetoric, and I rejoiced proudly in this honor and became inflated with arrogance. Still I was relatively sedate, Lord, as you know, and had no share in the wreckings of "The Wreckers" (for this stupid and diabolical name was regarded as the very badge of gallantry) among whom I lived with a sort of ashamed embarrassment that I was not even like them. But I lived with them, and at times I was delighted with their friendship, even when I abhorred their acts (that is, their "wrecking") in which they insolently attacked the modesty of strangers, tormenting them by uncalled-for jeers, gratifying their mischievous mirth. Nothing could more nearly resemble the actions of devils than these fellows. By what name, therefore, could they be more aptly called than "wreckers"?—being themselves wrecked first, and altogether turned upside down. They were secretly mocked and seduced by the deceiving spirits, in the very acts by which they amused themselves in jeering and horseplay at the expense of others.