But it is not much to bend: what is, above all, requisite for him is to get rid of his passions. Now Augustin's passions were old friends. How could he part with them? He lacked courage for this heroic treatment. Just think of what a young man of thirty-two is. He is always thinking of women. Lust holds him by the entanglements of habit, and he takes pleasure in the impurity of his heart. When, yielding to the exhortations of the Apostle, he tried to shape his conduct to his new way of thinking, the old friends trooped to beg of him not to do anything of the kind. "They pulled me," he says, "by the coat of my flesh, and they murmured in my ear--What, are you leaving us? Shall we be no more with you, for ever? _Non erimus tecum ultra in aeternum?_... And from that instant, the thing you well know, and still another thing, will be forbidden you for ever--for eternity...." Eternity! Dread word. Augustin shook with fear. Then, calming himself, he said to them: "I know you; I know you too well! You are Desire without hope, the Gulf without soundings that nothing can fill up. I have suffered enough because of you." And the anguished dialogue continued: "What matters that! If the only possible happiness for you is to suffer on our account, to fling your body into the voracious gulf, without end, without hope!"--"Let cowards act so!... For me there is another happiness than yours. There is _something else_: I am certain." Then the friends, put a little out of countenance by this convinced tone, muttered in a lower voice: "Still, just suppose you are losing this wretched pleasure for a phantasm still more empty.... Besides, you are mistaken about your strength. You cannot--no, you never can exist without us." They had touched the galling spot: Augustin knew his weakness only too well. And his burning imagination presented to him with extraordinary lucidity these pleasures which he could not do without. They were not only embracements, but also those trifles, those superfluous nothings, "those light pleasantnesses which make us fond of life." The perfidious old friends continued to whisper: "Wait a bit yet! The things you despise have a charm of their own; they bring even no small sweetness. You ought not to cut yourself off light-heartedly, for it would be shameful to return to them afterwards." He passed in review all the things he was going to give up; he saw them shine before him tinted in the most alluring colours: gaming, elaborate entertainments, music, song, perfumes, books, poetry, flowers, the coolness of forests (he remembered the woods about Thagaste, and his hunting days with Romanianus)--in a word, all that he had ever cared about, even to "that freshness of the light, so kind to human eyes."