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This article was also written to coincide with the 16th centenary of Augustine’s conversion, and originally published in Signum (3 February 1986) 3-6, the former documentary service for religious in England and Wales. It subsequently appeared in the United States, in The Priest (November 1986). It is sixteen hundred years since Augustine’s conversion to Christianity, an event that changed not only the course of his own life but also that of the Church. Apart from St Paul’s, no other conversion has had the same impact on the popular Christian mind. Even those who have not read the Confessions, know the story of the wayward son of St Monica who searched among the world’s philosophies and rel