About two years before his actual conversion St Augustine evinced the first signs of the kind of life he would embrace. He had reached the stage when it was no longer a matter of being sure of God but of ‘how to become more steadfast in God.’

He hoped to be directed by Simplicianus as to which should be the best course for one in his case to walk in the way of God. He witnessed the church full of faithful and one went this way and one went that, and he felt unhappy that although he had renounced all desire of honour and gain because of the attraction he felt for the ‘sweetness of God and the beauty of his house which he loved’, there yet remained entanglements which he found it hard to sever.

Augustine was aided in the last stages towards his conversion by the Striking accounts he heard of the numbers of those who devoted themselves to the monastic life. Pontitianus, his fellow countryman, a high official of the Milanese court, related to him the history of the Egyptian monk, St Antony, who on reading in St Matthew (19, 21): ‘Go, sell what thou hast and give to the poor and come follow me’, entered upon the religious life. He discovered that at that very time there was flourishing just outside Milan a monastery ‘full of good brethren’ under obedience to St Ambrose and this interested Augustine intensely. ‘Hitherto’, he says, ‘we knew nothing of it.’