For when you got there late and know it. One paragraph from a man's autobiography, addressed to God, written around the year 400 — and people have been saying it as their own ever since, because it is.
Sero te amavi
It is not a prayer in form — it is a paragraph of autobiography, and Augustine is telling God what happened. But it is addressed to him, and it says what most people who have found faith late would say if they could: I was looking for you everywhere except where you were, and you were the one who broke in.
The last five sentences are the five senses, one each — thou calledst, thou flashedst, thou breathedst, I tasted, thou touchedst — and it ends on the last of them with the word it has been circling: peace. It is the most precisely built paragraph in the book.
Augustine of Hippo wrote the Confessions around 397, ten years after his baptism, as a long prayer addressed to God about his own life — which is why a page of it can be said as prayer without changing a word. This passage is in the tenth book, where he has finished the story and is asking what it means. He was forty-three.
The English is Edward Pusey's, made in 1838 for the Oxford Movement's library of the Fathers. It is old-fashioned and it keeps Augustine's rhythm, which is the point of it; later translations are smoother and under copyright.
It became the sentence people quote when they find faith after a long time — late have I loved thee — and it is on the lips of every convert who reads the Confessions, which is most of them. Sixteen hundred years of people saying a fourth-century bishop's regret in the first person, because it was theirs.
The Eighteen Churches essay on this site is, in its way, the same paragraph.