I had not yet attained the truth, but I was rescued from falsehood. Then little by little, Lord, with a most gentle and merciful hand you touched and calmed my heart. I considered numerable things I believed which I had not seen, events which occurred when I was not present, such as many incidents in the history of nations, many facts concerning places and cities which I had never seen, many things accepted on the word of friends, many from physicians, many from other people. Unless we believed what we were told, we would do nothing at all in this life. Finally I realized how unmoveably sure I was about the identity of my parents from whom I came, which I could not know [from first hand, empirical knowledge] unless I believed what I had heard. You [God] persuaded me that the defect lay not with those who believed your books [the Bible], but with those who did not believe them. Nor were they to be listened to who might say to me ‘How do you know that these books were provided for the human race by the Spirit of the one true and utterly truthful God?’ That very thing was a matter in which belief was of the greatest importance.

—Augustine, Confessions 6.1.1; 6.5.7

I think Augustine’s experience is representative of many people’s experience of coming to know God’s truth. It certainly is of mine. As a young man, Augustine was obsessed with proving things empirically and refused to accept the validity of knowledge based on beliefs. But as he tells us here, God slowly and gently led him to the realization that a good deal of our knowledge is second hand, which perforce cannot be believed and appropriated without an act of faith. As he reminds us, we cannot even know directly about our parents’ lives before we are born. We have to take them at their word when they tell us about themselves. The insight into this truth apparently laid the groundwork for his acceptance of God’s truth contained in Scripture. May this help you in your own Lenten journey.