Once, during the holidays, [before his conversion, early church father] Augustine robbed a pear tree. He tells of the event with a quite extraordinary profundity. He desired to rob the tree, and he did rob it, but he was impelled neither by hunger nor poverty. In fact he did not want the pears at all; there were better ones in his own orchard.

Even after the theft he took no joy in what he had stolen. "But I took joy," he says, "in the theft and in the sin."