St. Augustine on His Book Confessions

Augustine starts his first book of the Confessions by praising the Lord and making reference to the Psalms. He asks how to pray and call upon God and to know more about his nature. Augustine continues his story of growing up, and explains that he learned to talk not because he was taught it but because God gave him the gift of learning. He goes on to talk about how he was beaten and punished when he messed up reading or writing in school. This is when he learned to pray and he prayed to God that he would stop getting beaten and he would stop messing up. Augustine believed that God gave us eternal life when he sent his son down to us to sacrifice his life for the sake of us. Augustine became very ill and begged to be baptized before he died. His father (Patrick) was the only person in the family who had not converted over to Christianity, but he never tried to stop anyone from pursuing their faith and what they believed in. Augustine never liked reading books and was rebellious towards anything anyone tried to teach him. He also said that if there was any good in him at all, that it was a reflection of God not himself.
Augustine starts his second book of Confessions out with a confession of the sins he experienced as a teenage boy. He has become fully aware now that his one desire was simply to love and be loved. St. Augustine had started to hang out with a bad group of kids and he was always feeling that he had to impress his friends by participating in wrong doings with them, such as Augustine says later, "Friendship can be a dangerous enemy,". Augustine feels that adolescence is a stage to test whether or not you will be able to resist taking part in evil doings.
In St. Augustine’s third book of Confessions Augustine had reached a point where he almost didn’t have a relationship with God anymore it was so bad. Around this time that is when St. Augustine began get more into the Manichaean faith. This faith was an early heretical form of Christianity. Augustine