St. Augustine's Confessions: Love and Lust

Sixteenth Year - Book 2 - Chapter 2
What was there to bring me delight except to love and be loved? But that due measure between soul and soul, wherein lie the bright boundaries of friendship, was not kept. Clouds arose from the slimy desires of the flesh and from youth's seething spring. They clouded over and darkened my soul, so that I could not distinguish the calm light of chaste love from the fog of lust. Both kinds of affection burned confusedly within me and swept my feeble youth over the crags of desire and plunged me into a whirlpool of shameful deeds. Your wrath was raised above me, but I knew it not. I had been deafened by the clanking chains of my morality, the penalty of my pride of soul. I wandered farther away from you, and you let me go. I was tossed about and spilt out in my fornications; I flowed out and boiled over in them, but you kept silent. Ah, my late-found joy! You kept silent at that time, and farther and farther I went from you, into more and more fruitless seedings of sorrows, with a proud dejection and a weariness without rest.
...I might have listened more heedfully to your voice as it sounded from the clouds: "Nevertheless, such shall have tribulations of the flesh. But I spare you." "It is good for a man not to touch a woman." And again, "He that is without a wife is solicitous for the things that belong to God, how he may please God. But he that is with a wife is solicitous for the things of this world and how he may please his wife." I should have listened more heedfully to these words, and having thus been made a eunuch for the sake of the kingdom of heaven, I would have looked with greater joy to your embraces.
But I, poor wretch, foamed over: I followed after the sweeping tide of passions and I departed from you. I broke all your laws, but I did not escape your scourges. For what mortal man can do that? You were always present to aid me, merciful in your anger, and charging with the greatest bitterness and disgust all my unlawful pleasures, so that I might seek after pleasure that was free from disgust, to the end that, when I could find it, it would be in none but you, Lord, in none but you. For you fashion sorrow into a lesson to us. You smite so that you may heal. You slay us, so that we may not die apart from you