Next, he listened to the preaching of Ambrose. The Bible no longer seemed to him absurd or at variance with a moral scheme. Ambrose's exegesis, half allegorical, half historic, might be accepted, taken altogether, by self-respecting minds. But what, above all, struck Augustin in the Scriptures, was the wisdom, the practical efficiency. Those who lived by the Christian rule were not only happy people, but, as Pascal would say, good sons, good husbands, good fathers, good citizens. He began to suspect that this life here below is bearable and has a meaning only when it is fastened to the life on high. Even as for nations glory is daily bread, so for the individual the sacrifice to something which is beyond the world is the only way of living in the world. So, little by little, Augustin corrected the false notions that the Manichees had filled him with about Catholicism. He acknowledged that in attacking it he had "been barking against the vain imaginations of carnal thoughts." Still, he found great difficulty in getting free of all his Manichean prejudices. The problem of Evil remained inexplicable for him, apart from Manichee teachings. God could not be the author of evil. This truth admitted, he went on from it to think, against his former masters, that nothing is bad in itself--bad because it has within it a corrupting principle. On the contrary, all things are good, though in varying degrees. The apparent defects of creation, perceived by our senses, blend into the harmony of the whole. The toad and the viper have their place in the operation of a perfectly arranged world. But physical ill is not the only ill; there is also the evil that we do and the evil that others do us. Crime and pain are terrible arguments against God. Now the Christians hold that the first is the product solely of the human will, of liberty corrupted by original sin, and that the other is permitted by God as a means of purifying souls. Of course, this was a solution, but it implied a belief in the dogmas of the Fall and of the Redemption. Augustin did not accept them yet. He was too proud to recognize an impaired will and the need of a Saviour. "My puffed-out face," he says, "closed up my eyes."