 I considered, he recalls, how innumerable were the things I believed, though I had not seen them, or was I present when they happened. So many things in the history of nations, so many things about places and cities I had never seen, so many things about my friends, about physicians, about countless other people, things which, if we did not believe, we could get nothing done in this life at all. Then I thought about what I held with an unshakable faith, that I was born of such parents, which I could not know, but had to take on faith from what I heard. Reason and personal experience can never suffice to tell us all we need to know. And so Augustine concludes, because we were too frail to find the truth by pure reason alone, we needed the authority of the sacred scriptures.