You, Lord, who make men of one mind dwell in a single house, also brought Evodius to join our company. He was a young man of our city, who, while serving as a secret service agent, was converted to you and baptized before us. He had relinquished his secular service, and prepared himself for yours. We were together, and we were resolved to live together in our devout purpose. We looked around for some place where we might be most useful in our service to you, and had planned on going back together to Africa. And when we had gotten as far as Ostia on the Tiber, my mother died. I am passing over many things, for I must hasten. Receive, my God, my confessions and thanksgiving for the unnumbered things about which I am silent. But I will not omit anything my mind has brought back concerning your handmaid who gave birth to me—in her flesh, so that I might be born into this world's light, and in her heart, so that I might be born to life eternal. I will not speak of her gifts, but of your gift in her; for she neither made herself nor trained herself. You created her, and neither her father nor her mother knew what kind of being was to come forth from them. And it was the rod of your Christ, the discipline of your only Son, that trained her in your fear, in the house of one of your faithful ones who was a sound member of your Church. Yet my mother did not attribute this good training of hers as much to the diligence of her own mother as to that of a certain elderly maidservant who had nursed her father, carrying him around on her back, as big girls carried babies. Because of her long-time service and also because of her extreme age and excellent character, she was much respected by the heads of that Christian household. The care of her master's daughters was also committed to her, and she performed her task with diligence. She was quite earnest in restraining them with a holy severity when necessary and instructing them with sober good sense. Thus, except at mealtimes at their parents' table—when they were fed very temperately—she would not allow them to drink even water, however parched they were with thirst. In this way she took precautions against an evil custom and added the wholesome advice: "You drink water now only because you don't control the wine; but when you are married and mistresses of pantry and cellar, you may not care for water, but the habit of drinking will be fixed." By such a method of instruction, and her authority, she restrained the longing of their tender age, and regulated even the thirst of the girls to such a decorous control that they no longer wanted what they ought not to have.
And yet, as your handmaid told me, her son, a love of wine had crept up on her. For, in the ordinary course of things, when her parents sent her as a sober girl to draw wine from the cask, she would hold a cup under the tap; and then, before she poured the wine into the bottle, she would wet the tips of her lips with a little of it, for her taste refused more than this. She did not do this out of any craving for drink, but out of the overflowing buoyancy of her time of life, which bubbles up with playfulness and youthful spirits, but is usually weighed down by the gravity of the old folks. And so, adding daily a little to that little—for "he who despises small things will fall by a little here and a little there"—she⁠a slipped into such a habit that she would eagerly drink off her little cup nearly full of wine. Where now was that wise old woman and her strict prohibition? Could anything prevail against our secret disease if your medicine, Lord, did not watch over us? Though father and mother and nurturers are absent, you are present, who create, who call, and who also work some good for our salvation, through those who are set over us. What did you do at that time, my God? How did you heal her? How did you make her whole? Did you not bring forth from another woman's soul a hard and bitter insult, like a surgeon's knife from your secret store, and with one thrust drain off all that putrefaction? For the slave girl who used to accompany her to the cellar started quarreling with her little mistress, as it sometimes happened when she was alone with her, and threw this vice of hers in her face, along with a very bitter insult: calling her "a drunkard." Stung by this taunt, my mother saw her own vileness and immediately condemned and renounced it. As the flattery of friends corrupts, so the taunts of enemies often instruct. Yet you repay them, not for the good you work through them, but for the malice they intended. That angry slave girl wanted to infuriate her young mistress, not to cure her; and that is why she spoke up when they were alone. Or perhaps it was because their quarrel just happened to break out at that time and place; or perhaps she was afraid of punishment for having told of it so late. But you, Lord, ruler of heaven and earth, who change to your purposes the deepest floods and control the turbulent tide of the ages, you heal one soul by the unsoundness of another; so that no man, when he hears of such a happening, should attribute it to his own power if another person whom he wishes to reform is reformed through a word of his.