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from De Quantitate Animae
St. Augustine, Bishop and Doctor
Translated by Joseph M. Colleran, C.SS.R., PhD

(Ancient Christian Writers:  The Works of the Fathers in Translation

The Newman Press, Westminster, Maryland, 1950)

Chapter 28, paragraph 55.

Therefore, although here one thing led us to another, still I do like to spend some time on a discussion which serves to teach the soul the lesson that it must not fall back on the senses any more than necessity demands; but it should rather retire into itself, away from the senses, and become a child of God again.  This is what it means to become a new man by putting off the old.  To undertake this is absolutely necessary because of the neglect of God's law: Sacred Scripture contains no greater truth, none more profound.  I would like to say more about this point and tie myself down while I am, as it were, laying down the law to you, so that my one and only concern might be to render an account of myself to myself, to whom I am above all responsible, and thus to become to God, as Horace says, like "a slave who is his master's friend."  This is an achievement that is utterly impossible unless we remake ourselves in His image, the image He committed to our care as something most precious and dear, when He gave us to ourselves so constituted that nothing can take precedence to us save He Himself.

But to my mind this calls for action than which is none more laborious, none that is more akin to inaction, for it is such as the soul cannot begin or complete except with the help of Him to whom it yields itself.  Hence it is that man's reformation is dependent on the mercy of him to whose goodness and power he owes his formation.