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 Merivale, Charles, 1808- 
 
 1893. 
 Four lectures on some epochs 
 
 of earlv Church historv 
 

FOUE LECTURES 
 
 ox SOME EPOCHS OF 
 
 EAELY CHURCH HISTOEY 
 
 DELIVERED AY ELY CATHEDRAL 
 
 BY 
 
 CHARLES MERIVALE, D.D. 
 
 DEAN OF ELY 
 
 NEW YORK 
 ANSON U. F. RANDOLPH A COMPANY 
 
 90U BROADWAY, COR. 20th ST. 
 

 PEEPACE, 
 
 The special object of these Lectures is sufficiently 
 indicated in the Introduction to the first of them. 
 I should not think it necessary to prefix any other 
 notice to them, but that I feel it right to mention 
 that in preparing the first and second I have put 
 myself under some obligation to the ingenious essays 
 of M. Bungener and M. Pressense, published some 
 years ago in a volume entitled ' Seances Historiques 
 a Greneve,' and in the third I have allowed myself 
 to insert, with slight alterations, two or three para- 
 graphs from a little work of my own on the ' General 
 History of Rome.' The fall of Rome and the build- 
 ing of the Christian Church are so closely con- 
 nected, that I found myself travelling for most part 
 of my way on lines very nearly parallel with those 
 with which I had been before familiar. 
 
 The delivery of these Lectures, which were com- 
 posed with a view to a limited number of young 
 
vi Preface. 
 
 students, was actually attended, much beyond my 
 expectation, by friends and neighbours of various 
 ages, both male and female, and no doubt with a 
 various amount of preparation for deriving instruc- 
 tion from them. I may say that I was much grati- 
 fied at finding that they possessed some interest for 
 a wider circle of hearers than I could have antici- 
 pated ; but I am led, from many circumstances, to 
 believe that the light which ecclesiastical and secular 
 history mutually throw upon each other is becoming 
 more and more keenly appreciated among us — 
 
 Facies non una duabus, 
 
 Nee diversa tamen, qualem decet esse sororum. 
 
 I plead this excuse for the publication of a little 
 volume which makes no pretension to special re- 
 search or originality of view. 
 
■ Of 
 PEUTeETOF 
 ■fi£C. FEB 1882 
 
 
 CONTENTS, 
 
 LECTURE I. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 St. Ambeose, and the Union of the Christian 
 
 Church with the State , .... 1 
 
 LECTURE II. 
 
 St. Augustine : some Lessons from his Life and 
 
 Teaching 53 
 
 LECTURE III. 
 
 St. Leo the Great, and the Rise of the Papacy . lOG 
 
 LECTURE ly. 
 
 St. Gregory, and the Early Missions of the 
 
 Church 160 
 

 '''<^^-i:^r^T:^;Il'>i 
 
 EAELY CHUECH HISTORY. 
 
 LECTUKE I. 
 
 ST. AMBROSE AND THE UNION OF THE CHRISTIAN 
 CHURCH WITH THE STATE. 
 
 My Lord Bishop, — You have expressed a wish that 
 some readings should from time to time be given 
 in this place on subjects connected with theology, 
 and especially with ecclesiastical history, at which 
 the clergy in our neighbourhood and such of the laity 
 as have some leisure to spare, and more particularly 
 our Divinity students, together, possibly, with the 
 upper classes of our grammar-scholars, should be 
 invited to attend. Your Lordship has honoured me 
 with a request that I should commence the series, 
 which I willingly obey. Our limits will hardly allow 
 me to make the preface which might be expected 
 at the outset of my undertaking. I must content 
 myself with saying that I shall address my remarks 
 
 B 
 
S^. Ambrose. 
 
 principally to our students and learners, and ask the 
 indulgence of others among my audience, to some of 
 whom I shall doubtless only repeat over again events 
 and ideas with which they have been long familiar, 
 while it is just possible that there may be a few who 
 will be hardly sufficiently advanced in scholarship to 
 follow my remarks with critical intelligence. 
 
 I am to give you some account to-day of the 
 political establishment of the Christian Church, and 
 of its union with the secular Empire of Kome in the 
 middle of the fomlh century, taking the illustrious 
 Ambrose Bishop of Milan as the central figure of 
 the epoch. With an ample subject before me and 
 limited space, I must ask you to excuse me if I 
 review the antecedent period very briefly and intro- 
 duce you to my subject with the least possible delay. 
 
 When the Emperor Constantino adopted the 
 Grospel for his own personal belief, the faith of Jesus 
 Christ did not thereupon become in any sense the 
 religion of the Empire. By the Edict of Milan, in 
 the year 313, Christianity first became legally tole- 
 rated. Before that period it had stood merely in the 
 condition of the few creeds which, among the many 
 which found favour in various provinces, had never 
 received the sanction of the general law. The 
 
S^. Ambrose. 
 
 decrees, indeed, which had been directly levelled 
 against it had been partial and occasional only, and 
 such hostile enactments mi^ht be suspended or with- 
 held for long periods together. A great part of the 
 third century afforded at least a breathing-time, 
 during which the Faith enjoyed a certain security, 
 sufficient to favour its extension, but at the same 
 time to deprave in some degree its principles. The 
 terrible persecutions of Decius and Diocletian braced 
 again its moral fibre, and we can hardly doubt that 
 the high tone which these trials engendered among 
 the believers helped to engage the attention, the 
 interest, and finally the conviction of the first 
 Imperial convert. 
 
 But Constantine was aware that the Christians 
 were but a fraction of the whole mass of his people ; 
 that it was not to such partial support that the 
 government of the world he had made his own 
 could be at once shifted ; that as a ruler of many 
 nations he must temporize with all ; and so deeply 
 was he impressed with the political exigencies of the 
 crisis that he allowed himself to keep his personal 
 faith in suspense almost to his last moments. He 
 accepted the homage of the Christian bishops on 
 the one hand, and of the Pagan priesthood on the 
 
 n 2 
 
Sf. A 77t brose. 
 
 other, permitting himself to act as the Head of the 
 Church upon earth, even while he assumed with the 
 title of Sovereign Pontiff the chief control of the 
 Pagan idolatries. 
 
 Constantine, then, did not confer on Christianity 
 the political position of a state Eeligion. Even had 
 he nominally done so it would not have altered the 
 fact that the Emperor and the State were still, and 
 long continued to be, essentially Pagan. We may 
 readily suppose that the Emperor's personal example, 
 with the favour he plainly showed to the new religion, 
 which indeed he virtually accepted long before he 
 submitted to the rite of baptism, induced a crowd of 
 officers and courtiers to conform to it, though others, 
 ruder and more independent, may have been all the 
 more repelled from it thereby. There were still 
 Komans of the old stamp among the ruling classes 
 of the falling Empire not less stubborn in their 
 religious than in their political principles. We may 
 imagine that in some eyes the Gospel lost much of 
 its spiritual attraction when it appeared so suddenly 
 prosperous, while the ancient creeds became endeared 
 to their latest votaries by falling under the shadow 
 of the Imperial displeasure, and by the first mut- 
 terings of the impending storm of disestablishment. 
 
St Ambrose. 5 
 
 But the Pagans were not in fact easily persuaded 
 that their ancient religious institutions were menaced 
 with any serious danger. They had seen many new 
 forms of faith rise and fall beside them in the course 
 of ages. Judaism had at one time invaded the 
 highest ranks of Koman society, and secured itself 
 a legal recognition through the countenance of 
 august personages. Other forms of Syrian worship 
 had followed in the train of Judaism, and had 
 emptied, while they were in fashion, the temples of 
 the old Italian divinities. The throne itself had 
 been occupied by a dynasty from the East, which had 
 leagued itself with the sensuous fanaticism of the 
 worship of the sun. Throughout the third century 
 the cult of Mithras had been perhaps more popular 
 even at Eome than the cult of Jupiter. The 
 cult of Magna Mater had been introduced from 
 Phrygia, of Isis and Anubis from Egypt, of the 
 Dea Caslestis from Carthage, and had been admitted 
 to a legal status in the city ; but all in turn had 
 forfeited their attractions, while the gods of Latium 
 still clung to their ancient seats with obstinate 
 tenacity. Again and again these venerable powers 
 had seemed to recover their influence, when 
 the Grovernment, under stress of manifold perils, 
 
S^. Ambrose. 
 
 sought to revive the fortunes of the Empire by 
 recourse to primitive traditions. So it was that 
 when the Christian Faith, the faith, as it seemed to 
 the world at large of a mere sect of Jewish fanatics, 
 became suddenly flattered by the favour of the Caesar, 
 the court, and the army, the multitude at first looked 
 on with wonder and curiosity, and presently with 
 deep mortification, but still refused to acknowledge 
 the full significance of the spiritual revolution before 
 them. They still clung to the assurance that as it 
 had been before, so would it be again ; the new 
 religion would soon be unmasked and discredited ; 
 the superstition of the Jew and the Syrian would be 
 but a nine-days' wonder ; the gods of Eome, who had 
 so long maintained the glories of the Empire, would 
 surely in due time regain their ascendancy. The 
 Pagan faction, secure of its ultimate success, made 
 no attempt to thwart its ruler's caprice, and was 
 content simply to ignore the facts before it. It con- 
 tinued to perform all the rites of the ancient faith ; 
 perhaps, as falling creeds are wont to do, even to 
 enhance their prominence and significance. It still 
 sanctified all public acts with the old Pagan usages; 
 still hailed its sovereign as the supreme minister 
 of its religion, and attributed his acts and caprices 
 
6y. Amh^ose. 
 
 to celestial impulses ; still prescribed the old vows 
 to the old divinities, in the name of Caesar and the 
 Senate ; still, in short, kept up the specific forms of 
 Pagan worship even to the deification of the Emperor 
 deceased and the invocation of his divine spirit 
 while still living. On the other hand, it abstained 
 studiously from any allusion to the place which 
 Christianity now actually held in public life. It 
 made an effort, a laborious effort, to pass over the 
 phenomenon in total silence. Throughout the few 
 remains of popular literature of the age of Con- 
 stantine we can trace, it seems, no single i reference 
 to the existence of the Christian Church or Creed. 
 Even at the end of the century the poet Claudian, 
 in versifying, as is his wont, all the chief events of 
 contemporary history, has not one word to say of 
 the new religion, which in his day had effected a 
 complete revolution both in Church and State. 
 
 Both the Caesar and his subjects had now, indeed, 
 equally agreed to shut their eyes to the gulf which 
 actually separated their ideas and sentiments. Con- 
 stantine withdrew tacitly from Kome, as if conscious 
 of the religious difficulty. Some say that he was 
 driven from his Pagan capital by remorse at the 
 murder of his son there; some were content to 
 
8 S^. Ambrose. 
 
 ascribe the foundation of Constantinople to views of 
 secular policy ; others, again, supposed that he was 
 piqued at the affronts put upon him by the populace 
 when, after holding the Council at Nicaea, he was 
 assailed with outcries and menaces in the streets of 
 Rome. So it was, however, that with no cause as- 
 signed, no deliberate policy declared, he abandoned 
 the centre of the ancient Paganism, at which neither 
 he nor his successors ever again resided, leaving the 
 imperial city to retain for another century the first 
 place in the Pagan world, while he enthroned the 
 Church of Christ in the New Rome on the Bosporus. 
 So it was that each rival power, each hostile princi- 
 ple, agreed serenely to ignore the most patent acts 
 of the other. ' 
 
 The Caesars who followed in the next generation, 
 when they found it politic to make a sojourn in the 
 West, generally took up their residence at Milan, 
 but never at Rome. It was from Milan that they 
 could most promptly direct the military operations 
 required by the dangers which thickened on the 
 Rhine and Danube. The political importance of the 
 capital of northern Italy had thus become second 
 only to that of Rome, while the remembrance of the 
 edicts which had issued from it might encircle the 
 
6V. Ambrose. 
 
 throne it offered to the Caesar with peculiar venera- 
 tion. Milan became now the Christian while Rome 
 continued to be the Pagan capital of the West. 
 Each religion, it might perhaps be thought, would 
 remain content with its own share of the Empire. 
 But hence it was that the Church, in the secondary 
 position it must occupy in its adversary's stronghold, 
 could play for another century only a secondary part 
 in the general career of the faith triumphant. The 
 absence of the sovereign from the ancient metropolis, 
 which was destined to play so great a part in the end 
 for the advancement of the Roman See or Papacy, 
 operated at first to retard the progress of the Church 
 at Rome, and to cripple the energies of its hierarchy. 
 It might have seemed at the time as though the 
 political future of the Christian Church pointed in 
 some other direction ; the Bishop of Rome might 
 seem for a time to be lost in the midst of a city 
 which the Imperial policy had now definitively aban- 
 doned to Paganism. Elsewhere, both east and west, 
 the new faith might march forward gloriously ; but 
 at Rome at least — at Rome, which had become a 
 present deity, a supernatural energy, in the eyes of 
 the Pagans — she must still give place to the Genius 
 Loci, the genius of twelve illustrious centuries. 
 
TO S^. Ambrose. 
 
 On considering the attitude thus assumed by the 
 rival persuasions at this period we naturally ask our- 
 selves, What was their relative force numerically ? 
 Upon this point various guesses have been hazarded, 
 but no enquirer can speak with any precision. The 
 data to which alone we can refer are both uncertain 
 and conflicting. The early Christian writers seem to 
 speak according to the object of the moment ; some- 
 times they are prone to represent their brethren as 
 already overflowing the Empire, even in the second 
 or third century ; sometimes as a feeble minority, as 
 a little flock of sheep straying in the wilderness, — 
 according as they wish to alarm their opponents with 
 physical or overawe them with moral force. All, 
 perhaps, that we can safely assume is, that the Chris- 
 tians, though still in a decided minority, were more 
 numerous in the East than in the West, where they 
 certainly formed but a small proportion of the whole 
 population. In Gaul, in Spain, in Britain, even in 
 Italy and Kome itself, the mass of the people were 
 far less advanced intellectually than in Greece or 
 Asia, and far less susceptible of the spiritual culture 
 implied by a disposition to accept the pure truths of 
 the Gospel. But it is most worthy of remark that 
 it was from the West notwithstanding that the im- 
 
J5V. Ambrose. \ i 
 
 pulse was given to the general conversion of the 
 Empire which ultimately followed. Constantine was 
 bred in the West, while his father Constantius had 
 commanded as Caesar in Graul. Constantius himself 
 had been noted as a favourer of the brethren, and had 
 refused to join in persecuting them. We must fur- 
 ther bear in mind that, besides the genuine adherents 
 either of the Christian or the Pagan creed, there 
 were doubtless a large number, possibly the bulk of 
 the whole population, who cannot be regarded in 
 strictness as attached either to the one or the other. 
 But the Christians, a small, an oppressed, but a 
 growing body, were all devoted heart and soul to the 
 creed which had enlisted them ; while Paganism was 
 a mere negative title which might be applied to 
 every one who was simply not a Christian. The 
 honest votaries of the old classical mythology of 
 Grreece and Rome were no doubt comparatively few ; 
 the worshippers of the Celtic and Teutonic divinities 
 may have been fewer still ; those of Mithras and of 
 other Oriental deities were probably more numerous 
 than either of these classes ; while the so-called Phi- 
 losophers, a large but fluctuating body, positively 
 rejected any religious creed at all. But, besides all 
 these, there still remained a vast mass of the un- 
 
12 ^S"^. Ambrose. 
 
 attached and irreclaimable, who were sunk in mere 
 carelessness and indifference. Accordingly, it is 
 possible that a really small number of genuine Chris- 
 tians could balance any one of the Pagan denomina- 
 tions, and even be compared with little disadvantage 
 with the actual devotees of the whole of them together. 
 But it was after all in their moral force that the 
 real superiority of the Christians lay. There can be 
 no doubt that the active and growing strength of 
 the Koman world was truly theirs — theirs was the 
 future of all civilised society. They were the men 
 who had risen in numbers and influence in spite of 
 three centuries of persecution, perhaps in conse- 
 quence of them. They had borne hardness; they 
 had drawn strength and vigour from the storms in 
 which they had been nurtured. How much then 
 might now be expected of them, now when they 
 were floating upon the wave of success, conscious 
 of the power within them, at the same time that 
 they felt a divine assurance of the promise of final 
 triumph ? They could speak with confidence in the 
 face of adversaries who were more and more visibly 
 cowed with the sense of decline and discomfiture. 
 Still more, the Christians were the men of the 
 highest moral character; honest, industrious, self- 
 
S^. Ambrose. i2i 
 
 denying, good husbands, good parents, men who had 
 made many sacrifices, and could make many more, 
 men who might be trusted. In the eyes of far-seeing 
 and thinking men their triumph was already assured, 
 and Constantine, a man of great common sense com- 
 bined in a singular measure with an ardent imagi- 
 nation, might easily persuade himself that, however 
 few in number, the Christians were the stuff of which 
 empires are constituted. This was the sign of victory 
 in which he trusted ; not the feigned or fancied cross 
 in the heavens, which makes so pretty a legend in 
 ecclesiastical history. 
 
 We may suppose, indeed, that the favour thus 
 unexpectedly showered on the new faith by the Im- 
 perial government would tend inevitably to reverse 
 the proportions of the two persuasions, or rather of 
 the two parties, which now divided the Eoman world. 
 Powerful as the example of rulers has always been in 
 such matters, it would never perhaps be more so than 
 at the moment when Paganism, corrupt and effete, 
 had lost all the spirit of a real faith, and when, as 
 we shall see, Christianity was only too ready to accept 
 overtures to the easy compromise which its rivals 
 soon began to offer it. Nevertheless, the progress of 
 the Church of Christ was really slower and less com- 
 
14 St Amdj^ose. 
 
 plete than might have been expected. Some allow- 
 ance, as we have seen, must be made for the spirit of 
 pique and the wounded pride of a class so deeply 
 prejudiced on all matters of sentiment as the mag- 
 nates of Eoman society. But Paganism, it must be 
 added, developed at her last gasp a new principle of 
 vitality, and nerved herself for a desperate conflict 
 along her whole line. While the Emperors, partly 
 from policy, partly from their personal indifference, 
 abstained from overt measures against the doomed 
 superstitions, she still flattered herself that her end 
 was not come, and might yet be averted. Paganism 
 had not fallen at the first blow, she had not fled in 
 confusion on the first turn of fortune. The Pagans 
 dreamt that the danger was passed, or postponed at 
 least for a season. The pendulum must swing back 
 again. They still cherished in their hearts a con- 
 viction that the existence of their faith was indis- 
 solubly connected with that of the Empire itself; 
 and the day had hardly yet arrived when the turmoil 
 of Goths and Germans on the frontier could alarm them 
 for the ultimate safety of the Empire. Such was the 
 sentiment which inspired Julian with the preposte- 
 rous idea of reviving the worship of the gods of 
 mythology ; but Julian, if he succeeded at all even 
 
kSV. Ambrose. 15 
 
 with the Pagan vulgar, was never anything but a 
 laughing-stock to the more intelligent even among 
 the nominal Pagans themselves. Julian, however, 
 was cut off in the year 363, and the feeble reaction 
 which he had set in motion in the course of his 
 short reign was at once reversed. The Emperors 
 Valens and Valentinian were once more Christians, 
 and the world proceeded to conform more and more 
 widely to the fashion of their opinion. Eome almost 
 alone stood sullenly aloof. Among all the Bishops 
 of Rome there was none, nor till the next century did 
 any arise, with ability to give an impulse to the new 
 faith at the focus of unbelief, or disturb the influ- 
 ence which the ancient systems still enjoyed in the 
 Senate and among the chief rulers of the capital. 
 The throne of the Western Csesars was now planted 
 definitively at Milan ; and now it is that the illus- 
 trious Ambrose, of whom I am to speak more particu- 
 larly, comes upon the stage. 
 
 Ambrose was of noble Graulish extraction, born at 
 Lyons, or possibly at Treves, in the year 340. His 
 Greek name, suggesting the meaning of ' immortal,' 
 was probably given him by Christian relatives. We 
 must not suppose, however, that he was baptized in 
 infancy. The baptism of Ambrose is recorded at a 
 
1 6 S^. Ambrose. 
 
 much later period of his life. His father, indeed, seems 
 to have been a Pagan, but to have died while the child 
 was yet of tender years ; it was from his mother and 
 his sister that he received his early Christian train- 
 ing. The future bishop and father of the Church 
 was bred for a civil career. He gave precocious 
 evidence of talents for forensic oratory ; of him, 
 too, the old story is repeated that a swarm of bees 
 once rested on his lips in his infancy, and the 
 happy presage was duly accepted. Ambrose prac- 
 tised at the bar at Eome, and at the age of twenty- 
 five was noted as the most promising of advocates at 
 the centre of all civil accomplishments. He was 
 thence advanced to the post of governor of Liguria, 
 in the north of Italy ; but this perhaps did not 
 require residence, for we next hear of him as estab- 
 lished at Milan. ' You are more fit to be a bishop 
 than a governor,' was said of him by a high civil 
 authority at the time; but whether ironically we 
 cannot tell. However this may be, the words carried 
 their fortune with them. At this moment, the Arian 
 bishop Auxentius died. The success of the Arian 
 party in the West had already culminated, and 
 was just beginning to decline. Parties were almost 
 equally balanced, and the choice of a chief pastor of 
 
6V. Ambrose, jj 
 
 the Christian flock seemed on the point of being 
 decided by a violent and perhaps a sanguinary 
 struggle. On the day appointed, the multitude of 
 electors met in the principal church (even at that 
 time, even at Milan, the Clnistians could hardly 
 have been a majority of the population), and the 
 governor hastened there to prevent the expected 
 collision. While he is addressing the people and 
 striving to calm their passions, lo ! a child's voice is 
 heard none knew whose or whence — neque erat cogno- 
 scere promptu'}n unde, sed audita est — exclaiming, 
 ' Ambrose, bishop ! ' The crowd took up the cry, and 
 repeated it from mouth to mouth ; and so Ambrose 
 became Bishop of Milan by popular acclamation. 
 
 Some critics have imagined that this famous 
 incident was prepared beforehand, but, as far as we 
 can judge, there seems to have been no person or 
 party especially interested in it. As for Ambrose 
 himself, the story goes on to assure us that he was 
 distressed and alarmed at the unexpected issue, and 
 even went so far as to pretend to some gross irregu- 
 larities and immoral enormities, in order to scare his 
 admirers. This, indeed, is a foolish gloss, such as might 
 almost suffice to discredit the incident altogether. 
 But who shall say that so strange a story is not, after 
 
 c 
 
i8 S^. Ambrose. 
 
 all, a mythical invention, in explanation of an elec- 
 tion which to the next generation seemed clearly 
 providential ? The appointment of Ambrose to the 
 see of Milan at that precise moment led doubtless 
 to a marked crisis in the fortunes of the Church, and 
 to the apprehension of the age it might appear that 
 it could not have taken place without some patent 
 token of Divine interference. Certainly, such a story 
 occurring in secular annals would be i-egarded as 
 plainly mythical by the modern school of historical 
 criticism. But, however this may be, its value would 
 be recognised as showing, even though it were an 
 involuntary fiction, that the election of a bishop by 
 the voice of the people might be accepted as valid 
 at the time, and its validity sanctioned by the judg- 
 ment of a later generation. ' I know but one bishop,' 
 said the Emperor Theodosius, enthusiastically, ten 
 years later, ' and that is Ambrose.' Another curious 
 sign of contemporary opinion appears in the fact that 
 Ambrose was not only a layman, but up to that 
 moment had never been baptized. He was admitted 
 immediately to the rite of Christian initiation, and 
 received consecration a few days after. 
 
 Doubtless the circumstances of this extraordinary 
 election recommended the new prelate to the con- 
 
6y. Ambrose. 19 
 
 fidence of the Emperor Valentinian, who on his 
 deathbed, in the year 375, entrusted his tender child 
 Grratian to his favourite's special care. Grratian soon 
 afterwards placed his able general Theodosius at the 
 head of the Eastern provinces, and retained for him- 
 self the charge of the Western only, establishing 
 his residence, as usual, at Milan. The temper of 
 Ambrose was bold and haughty ; the young prince 
 was timid and compliant. The opportunity seemed 
 to have arrived for advancing the Christian Chm-ch 
 from the status of mere recognition to that of 
 superiority and of exclusive support from the govern- 
 ment. The Bishop recognised her opportunity, and 
 began, it would seem, with demanding the sup- 
 pression of heresy within the Christian pale itself. 
 Ecclesiastical councils had decided on points of faith, 
 and the Emperors had convened and presided at 
 these councils. It might be urged, accordingly, that 
 disregard of the decrees of councils was disloyalty to 
 the sovereign, and as such might be legitimately 
 punished by the secular arm. The ancient law of 
 Majestas might still cast its shadow over the tri- 
 bunals. It is not clear that as yet any reputed 
 heretic had been directly subjected to legal penalti(^s 
 for his errors in belief. Priscillian, the first who is 
 c 2 
 
20 S^. Ambrose. 
 
 supposed to have thus suffered, was charged at least 
 at the same time with gross immorality, and Ambrose 
 is said to have regretted the capital sentence which 
 was pronounced upon him. Yet, when all was over, 
 Ambrose could exclaim, not without exultation, ' The 
 Emperor has shut the mouths of the heretics ; would 
 that he could change their hearts ! ' But from 
 coercing a Christian heresy, even if technically illegal, 
 it was but a short step to insult and degrade the 
 long-sanctioned and legitimised forms of Paganism. 
 Grratian himself, following the accepted traditions of 
 the government, was not unwilling to temporize 
 with the votaries of the Olympian consistory. 
 Christian though he was, he did not scruple to allow, 
 even to command, his father's apotheosis. The poet 
 Ausonius celebrates this act as a signal mark of filial 
 piety, and it is probable that Ausonius was himself 
 at least a nominal Christian. Gratian took into his 
 special favour the sophist Themistius, unquestion- 
 ably a Pagan, and was rewarded with a panegyric, 
 in which his name is associated with the praises of 
 the ancient divinities. The Imperial believer is not 
 displeased with the profane flattery of his unbelieving 
 subjects. But suddenly, in the year 382, four years 
 after his accession, lie allows the world to know that 
 
S^. Amlrose. 21 
 
 the influence of the Christian bishop is fully in the 
 ascendant, and that Paganism is to suffer alike in 
 its material interests and in the sentiments which 
 are dearest to it. From this period we may date the 
 first attacks upon the revenues of the old-established 
 faith. Grratian seizes upon the endowments of the 
 temples, which had been enriched through long ages 
 of munificence by lands and treasures appropriated 
 to their maintenance by their votaries. He revokes 
 the various secular privileges of many priesthoods ; 
 he abolishes the venerable institution of the Vestals : 
 perhaps he said to them, like a great Eeformer of 
 later days, ' Go, spin, ye jades' ; but the nuns of 
 modern times have never been invested with the 
 exceeding sanctity which attached, in the eyes of 
 the Pagans, to the sacred virgins, on whose inviolate 
 purity the salvation of the Empire was reputed to 
 depend. The decrees for the forfeitiu-e of religious 
 property were no doubt very imperfectly executed, as 
 may be learnt from many historical notices of later 
 times ; but an affront, more odious than any injury, 
 was still in store for the votaries of the ancient cult. 
 Gratian commanded the removal of the altar and statue 
 of Victory from the Senate-house at Kome itself. 
 We may not at first sight comprehend the full 
 
2 2 SL Ambrose. 
 
 significance which the Pagans in the city attached 
 to this arbitrary act. We, Cambridge-men, have, 
 I dare say, all remarked the statue of Victory which 
 has stood, longer back than any of us can remember, 
 in the Law-School of our University. I know not 
 how many of us may be aware that this work of art 
 originally graced our Senate-house, where it has 
 been replaced, I believe, by the still more interesting 
 effigy of William Pitt. Still I may venture to 
 think that the noble hall wherein our degrees are 
 conferred and our prizes awarded, wherein we receive 
 and decorate our distinguished visitors, wherein so 
 many of our illustrious alumni have contended for 
 the honour of representing us in Parliament, was a 
 fitter shrine for the statue of Victory than the exa- 
 mination-room or school, which is but a vestibule, 
 as it were, to her temple. But the sentiment of the 
 Romans of the declining Empire towards the god- 
 dess who had so long protected and distinguished 
 tliem must have been far keener and more fervid. 
 One by one the glories of the Olympians had 
 faded from sight. They might engage the formal 
 attentions of a scanty remnant among the vulgar, 
 but hardly of more or worthier votaries. The re- 
 ligious feeling of the religious people of the day, 
 
S/. Ambrose. 23 
 
 whether they were few or many, had become fixed 
 upon certain abstractions of which Rome, the city 
 itself, the pledge of Empire, approached nearest to 
 a concrete substance; the rest were of the most 
 shadowy nature, such as Fortune, and Fame, and 
 Victory.' For Victory at least, or for the visible 
 image of Victory, there could be no more fitting 
 shrine, no place more touching to the popular imagi- 
 nation, than the fabric in which the august senators 
 still met, and still repeated a faint echo of the 
 debates by which the conquest of the world had 
 been once directed. The statue of Victory, with the 
 oblations oh its altar, might still be regarded as a 
 
 ' I will go a little out of my way to point out, to those who 
 may care to refer to it, a passage from Statius {Thehaid, x. 628) 
 at the end of the first century, in which the poet describes, with 
 much circumlocution and apparent hesitation, a nameless god- 
 dess who inspires men with virtus, a quality which transcends 
 mere valour, inasmuch as it bears some moral significance 
 also : — 
 
 ' Nunc age, quis stimulos et pulchrae gaudia mortis 
 
 Addiderit juveni, &c. . . . 
 
 Diva Jovis solio juxta comes, unde per orbem 
 
 Rara dari, terrisque solet contingere, virtus ; 
 
 Seu pater omnipotens tribuit, sive ipsa capaces 
 
 Elegit penetrare viros,' &c. . . . Comp. v. 783. 
 
 In simpler ages such a divine grace or impulse would have 
 been ascribed to Minerva ; but now a new motive power must 
 be introduced for which no name or concrete personality ha 
 been invented. We are admitted for once to tlie actual birth 
 of an abstract divinity. 
 
24 SL Amh'ose. 
 
 visible pledge of the Empire which had been 
 acquired by three hundred conquests. The Pagans 
 might well adore it as the palladium of the State 
 novv so fearfully threatened by foreign invasion and 
 internal revolution. 
 
 The senators of Eome had long forfeited all 
 their ancient power ; but they had not forgotten the 
 craft by which in other times their policy had 
 been no less distinguished. To craft they must now 
 resort. The old Pagan title of Pontifex Maximus 
 had been for ages held inseparable from the Imperial 
 dignity. Augustus had demanded it, and his succes- 
 sors, one after another, had jealously retained it. 
 This title connected the Csesar most closely with the 
 established creed of the Empire ; it gave him control 
 over the ritual of the national religion, and power 
 over the introduction of foreign cults. Accordingly 
 Gratian, Christian though he professed himself, was 
 at the same time Supreme Pontiff of the Pagans, and 
 still inscribed the title upon his coins, as his Chris- 
 tian predecessors had all done before him. But the 
 Senate conceived the idea of utilising his acceptance 
 of this prerogative for their own objects. They 
 aimed at making the Pagan character of the sove- 
 reign conspicuous and unmistakable; at insisting 
 
S^. Ambrose. 
 
 on the reality of what men were disposed to treat 
 quietly as a guileless fiction. A robe, preserved 
 with special care in the Capitol, was, it seems, the 
 outward symbol of this supreme pontificate. The 
 College of Priests, under the direction of the Senate, 
 brought forth this venerable vestment, and bore it 
 pompously into Gaul, where Gratian chanced to be 
 then sojouiTiing. Ambrose, it seems, always a con- 
 fidential favourite, was then in attendance upon the 
 Emperor, and being consulted by him, declared that 
 the time had come for him to perform the duty in 
 which his august forerunners had hitherto failed. 
 Gratian, at the prompting of the Christian prelate, 
 refuses to accept the proffered robe. This, says he, is 
 a decoration altogether unbecoming to a Christian 
 man. The Pontiffs are struck with consternation. 
 Their cunning device has been baffled. The Empe- 
 ror has pronounced, more unequivocally than ever, 
 for the new faith and against the old. A great 
 crisis in the spiritual history of man is evidently at 
 hand. Nevertheless the victory is not yet complete, 
 possibly not yet assured. The time-honoured com- 
 promise between the two parties must still for a 
 time endure. Gratian, who has refused the robe, 
 allows himself notwithstanding: to flourish the title 
 
26 S^. Ambi'ose. 
 
 which it betokens. Jn his official acts, upon his 
 medals, he is still qualified as Pontifex Maximus ; 
 in the same spirit perhaps as our Henry VIII. 
 clutched the title of Defender of the Faith after he 
 had rejected the Faith, at least the outward form of 
 faith which he had originally undertaken to defend. 
 If any one had contested Henry's claim to this title, 
 he would have surely suffered for it; and if any 
 one had complained of the similar inconsistency in 
 the conduct of Gratian he would have fallen, amid 
 general acclamation, under the sentence of Imperial 
 law. So illogical can we be when it suits us, both 
 ancients and moderns ! Yet we may recognise in this 
 trivial matter the hand of a disposing Providence. 
 It was well for the growth of Christianity at this 
 crisis that neither at Eome nor at Milan should the 
 Bishop yet have room to thrust himself into the 
 place of sovereign Pontiff or supreme director of 
 men's consciences. Rightly or wrongly the title was 
 still occupied by the secular power, which would not 
 yet suffer itself to be called in question by a mere 
 spiritual priesthood. 
 
 Meanwhile political events were working in 
 favour of the Christians. Gratian fell indeed in a 
 mutiny headed by one of his officers; but whatever, 
 
S/. Ambrose. 27 
 
 had been Ambrose's influence with Gratian it was 
 redoubled when he became the adviser of Gratian's 
 brother, the younger Valentinian. The moment was 
 critical. The usurper's name was Maximus. This 
 man called himself a Pagan, at least the Pagans 
 rested their hopes on him. While the blow which 
 he eventually struck was still suspended, one of the 
 priests whom Gratian had disappointed was heard to 
 mutter : ' If Gratian will not be Pontifex Maximus, 
 Maximus will soon be pontifex.' When Gratian fell 
 the Pagan historian declares that he was justly 
 punished for the affront he had put upon ministers 
 of the ancient religion. The usurper, it was anti- 
 cipated, would lay the lesson to heart. The position 
 of Ambrose was now doubtless a difficult one. 
 Maximus seems to have been disposed to treat him, 
 as well as his party generally, with forbearance. He 
 did not care to raise up for himself more enemies. 
 Ambrose, for his part, was not unwilling to acquiesce 
 in the course which worldly prudence dictated. He 
 refrained from irritating the tyrant, who could be 
 himself so forbearing. Perhaps it was through the 
 Bishop's counsels and complacent attitude that 
 JNIaximus was led to content himself with the com- 
 mand of the army, and to allow the Imperial province 
 
28 SL Ambj^ose. 
 
 of Italy to retain its fidelity to Grratian's younger 
 brother, mere stripling though he was. If it was 
 the courtly prelate who protected Valentinian and 
 preserved the title of Emperor for him, Ambrose 
 gained his reward in the unbounded authority he 
 was shortly enabled to exercise over him. 
 
 Doubtless the Pagan party at Eome regarded the 
 success of Maximus as an encouragement to their 
 own views. They proceeded promptly to draw from 
 it all the advantage which it presented to them. 
 Most honoured among their leaders was the 
 illustrious orator Symmachus, a decided Pagan, the 
 pupil and inheritor of the fame of the not less 
 illustrious Libanius, who had been Julian's cliief 
 adviser. By counsel of this personage, who was 
 holding high office in the ancient capital, they 
 determined to demand of the Imperial infant, not 
 the assumption of the pontifical vestment, but the 
 restoration of the statue of Victory itself. They sent 
 a deputation to Milan with this object, placing 
 Symmachus as their spokesman at its head. They 
 were dismayed perhaps at finding that the timid 
 child, whom they hoped to overawe, had already 
 thrown himself into the arms of Ambrose, and had 
 allowed the Bishop to arrange for a personal disputa- 
 
S^. Ambrose. 29 
 
 tion on the matter in hand, in which Symmachus 
 should first urge his demand, and Ambrose confront 
 it with a formal reply. And so the battle of the old 
 faith and the new was openly fought and won in a 
 memorable encounter. 
 
 The Christian party, which gained the victory, 
 could afford to publish the arguments on either side ; 
 and so it happens that we possess at this day the 
 actual manifestoes put forth by the rival creeds each 
 in face of the other. 
 
 Kings and courts have listened in later times to 
 the word-fence of polemical disputants, and theolo- 
 gical students have followed with interest, and some- 
 times with profit, the recorded arguments of earnest 
 combatants, fighting for their faith and hope, their 
 honour, and perhaps even their lives. It must be 
 confessed, however, that on the occasion before us, 
 the first I suppose of its kind, neither of the orators 
 showed himself equal to the duty imposed upon him. 
 Each of them plainly sought the victory rather 
 than the truth. Each was content to use just the 
 weapons which he deemed most effective for his im- 
 mediate object. Each appeared at the bar as an 
 advocate, and rhetoric in those days was easily 
 accepted for counsel or for persuasion. Perhaps it 
 
30 SL Ainbj'ose. 
 
 may be said that neither the creed of the Pagan 
 nor the creed of the Christian admitted of such 
 methods of reasoning as would convince the other. 
 Even if the Pagan could have produced any plausi- 
 ble evidence for his auguries, his visions, and his 
 miracles, the Christian might have afforded to admit 
 it liberally, while he alleged, on his part, that such 
 naarvels might be the work not of the true God only, 
 but also of demons. Had the Christian appealed 
 to the supernatural in Scripture, the Pagan might 
 of course have made a similar reply. Against the 
 fulfilled prophecies of Holy Writ he would have set 
 the pretended authority of the Sibyls and the Oracles, 
 which had deceived even Christians themselves. 
 Such arguments were in fact tacitly relinquished on 
 both sides. The contest did actually resolve itself 
 mainly into the assertion by the Pagan speaker of 
 the protection which the Olympian deities had ever 
 accorded to the Roman State, culminating in an 
 earnest and touching appeal to the claim of a vener- 
 able antiquity and the common consent of imme- 
 morial wisdom and experience. But both of these 
 propositions Ambrose meets and easily refutes, 
 showing that the gods had abandoned Rome on 
 many critical occasions, and were even then aban- 
 
S^. Ambrose. 
 
 doning her, while the plea of antiquity was refuted by 
 the notorious habit of the Romans of admitting novel 
 divinities and novel usages to the same honours with 
 the old. The Christian had doubtless the best of 
 the argument, such as it was ; but we cannot fail to 
 be much disappointed at the inconclusive reasoning 
 which prevailed almost throughout so solemn a 
 debate. Strange it must seem to us that the de- 
 fender of our Faith at such a crisis should make no 
 reference to the moral beariugs of the question, no 
 appeal to the practical results of a living creed in 
 purifying the heart, in instilling principles of justice, 
 honesty, and fortitude, nor to the spiritual efficacy 
 of the Grospel in lifting men above the world, and 
 creating them anew in the likeness of the Holy One. 
 No ; the argument of the sainted Bishop is of the 
 earth, earthy. Indeed the ease with which he gains 
 so complete a victory with such weapons as he deigns 
 to use is perhaps the most significant point in the 
 whole discussion. 
 
 We may reflect, however, that after all, every 
 age has its own trials in religious belief, and every 
 age provides its own way of meeting them. The 
 attacks upon the Christian faith, and the defences 
 opposed to them, vary, as we know, from one genera- 
 
32 S^. Ambrose. 
 
 tion to another. It is only a few palmary arguments 
 on either side that retain their force from one 
 generation to another. The attacks of Voltaire and 
 the defence of Paley have both lost much of the 
 repute in which they were held in the last century ; 
 and we must not allow ourselves to disparage over- 
 much the reasoning of a Symmachus and an Ambrose, 
 or think that, because they have little value for us, 
 they did not touch the heart of the audience which the 
 speakers undertook in their turn to influence. Let us 
 not refuse all sympathy with the spiritual yearnings 
 of the last assertor of a worn-out creed, nor withhold 
 our admiration from the bold though somewhat 
 loose declamation of the Christian orator, to whose 
 zeal the intellectual triumph of our Faith is perhaps 
 mainly owing. Ambrose, as may be supposed, was 
 judged to be the better reasoner^ of the two ; the 
 statue of Victory was not restored to the Pagans ; 
 and from that time, we may go on to remark, 
 Victory herself, that ' winged thing,' as the poet calls 
 her,^ never again settled on their standards; the 
 momentary shadow of a reaction in their favour, under 
 
 * Keats {Hyperion, ii. 341), imagining a parallel contest 
 between the old gods of classical mythology and the new : 
 • That was before we knew the winged thing, 
 Victory, might be lost, or might be won.* 
 
S^. Ambrose. 33 
 
 Eugenius, some years later, does not deserve our 
 consideration. The gains of the Pagan misbelief 
 upon the doctrine and practice of the Christians 
 have been and still perhaps are more insidious. 
 
 This was the first great victory of Ambrose. It 
 was the triumph of the champion of Christianity, 
 with which his illustrious name must ever be asso- 
 ciated; but, in fact, it was the cause which triumphed 
 rather than the man. The time was ripe for it, and 
 almost any disputant of high position and admitted 
 ability might doubtless have gained the same success 
 on the same arena. If Ambrose owes to it his title 
 of Saint, the Church of Christ owes to it, by Grod's 
 providence, her historical position as the spiritual ruler 
 of nations. The time was come when the Church 
 might say to her adversaries, so long her persecutors: 
 'You have hitherto been the strongest, but I am 
 the stronger now. Up, and quit your place, and 
 there let me seat myself ! You never hearkened to 
 my pleas ; little heed will I now take of your?, 
 except it be to deride and trifle with them.' 
 
 So far the Church showed herself imperious, per- 
 haps arrogant, but the spirit of ecclesiastical intoler- 
 ance was now beginning to arise. True, that when 
 the secular power punished the heretic Priscillian 
 
 D 
 
34 '^^' Ambi^ose. 
 
 for disloyalty or, it may be, for immorality rather than 
 for dogmatic error, Ambrose could express himself 
 grieved and shocked. Nevertheless, while Paganism 
 was still too strong to have her temples closed and 
 her rites forbidden, he did not scruple to set the 
 fatal example of maltreating the Jews, in sup- 
 porting an impetuous prelate who had allowed a 
 synagogue to be burnt, and forbidding it to be 
 rebuilt. ' This is not a matter of police and social 
 right,' he said ; 'there is a religious principle involved 
 in it. Keligion must be paramount.' From that 
 day commenced the long and frightful series of 
 Jewish wrongs throughout Christendom. Can any- 
 thing be more awful ? On such a point one cannot 
 speak without emotion; nor would I disguise the 
 satisfaction I cannot but feel at the cowardice this 
 bold oppressor himself betrays when it is his cue 
 to flatter the new usurper Arbogastes, who had mur- 
 dered his patron Valentinian. Ambrose has occa- 
 sion to pronounce the young prince's funeral oration. 
 Many fine things he says, perhaps not unjustly, of 
 the hapless victim ; but when he is obliged at last 
 to make some allusion to the foul deed by which he 
 fell, the Bishop turns courtier, and is content to 
 intimate that politics are beyond his sphere ; his 
 
kSV. Ambrose. 
 
 language, he declares, is the accent of sorrow, not 
 of accusation. 'Jesus Christ Himself in dying 
 cursed not His enemies, but prayed for them ! ' So 
 was the Church of Christ put to its first trial as a 
 State-Church, and it fell ! Such, again, is the strain 
 of priestly courtliness wliich in later times and other 
 countries, and notably in Catholic France under her 
 Catholic kings, has attained its evil notoriety. 
 
 But Ambrose was allowed to gain a second 
 victory, a more difficult, and so far a greater victory 
 than the first. This later triumph was gained indeed 
 in the cause of the Church rather than of the Faith 
 itself. By one bold and resolute stroke he shifted 
 the position of the Church from that of a handmaid 
 of the secular ruler to that of his spiritual controller. 
 Such at least was the claim he tacitly advanced, 
 and deep is the mark it has made on the history of 
 Christendom ever since, wide the recognition it has 
 received among Christian communities even to the 
 present day. The Papal Syllabus, of which we have 
 heard so much in recent times, may pretend to be 
 the legitimate descendant of the rebuke inflicted by 
 Ambrose upon the Emperor Theodosius. 
 
 This illustrious prince, himself a great captain 
 and the son of the greatest captain of his day, had 
 
 D 2 
 
36 S^. Ambi^ose. 
 
 been called by the Western Emperor Gratian to the 
 throne of Constantinople, and had saved the Eastern 
 Empire from an invasion of the Goths. He was 
 regarded as the saviour of society ; still more he was 
 regarded by the orthodox party in the Church, which 
 was now regaining its ascendancy, as the protector 
 of the true Faith. He was reputed to be an earnest 
 believer, and we need not question that he actually 
 was so. At a later period, when he was enabled to 
 unite the two Empires under one sceptre, he had the 
 courage to issue edicts for the closing of the Pagan 
 temples and the abolition of their services, — edicts 
 loudly proclaimed indeed, but still only partially 
 and occasionally enforced. But great, and brave, 
 and pious as we may hope he was, a deep stain 
 attached to his character from the massacre he 
 allowed himself to commit at Thessalonica, when he 
 brutally avenged a popular sedition by putting to 
 the sword seven thousand of its inhabitants. The 
 great Christian Emperor repeated the frightful crime 
 of the monster Caracalla, at which all Pagandom 
 had shuddered, at Alexandria. We may well believe 
 that the Christians, with all their admiration for their 
 august patron, were sincerely shocked at it, and 
 resented the advantage such a scandal would give 
 
S^. Amb7^ose. 
 
 to the heretics and unbelievers. It would be a 
 grand stroke of policy, they might think, if any one 
 among them would bravely denounce it before the 
 world, and demonstrate to the Empire, Pagan as well 
 as Christian, that the faith of Christ is everywhere 
 and at all times a living moral power. 
 
 This was the step which Ambrose, no doubt with 
 more than ordinary courage, determined to take. 
 He addressed the guilty tyrant with a letter : ' You 
 have sinned,' he wrote, 'as David did. Can you 
 hesitate to do what David did afterwards ? You 
 have imitated him in his crime ; now is the time to 
 emulate him in his penitence. Devoted as I am to your 
 majesty in all otlier matters, this, at least, I am 
 constrained to declare, that I could not offer in your 
 presence the Holy Sacrifice ! I could not do so after 
 the spilling of one innocent man's blood. How then 
 could I do so after your spilling the blood of such 
 a multitude ? ' 
 
 To this address Theodosius, it seems, makes no 
 reply, but on his return to Milan goes without demur 
 to the cathedral. The Bishop meets him at the 
 portal, and, in the name of the Most High, forbids 
 him to ent^r. For a moment the Emperor hesitates, 
 and essays to parley; but the prelate holds his 
 
3S 6V. Ambrose. 
 
 ground firmly, and he desists and withdraws. It is 
 not till after a penitence of eight months' duration 
 that Ambrose suffers him to present himself in the 
 church of the Lord Jesus. 
 
 The story is simple and touching. The greatest 
 arts — painting, poetry, sculpture — have all, it has 
 been said, assisted the Muse of History in colouring 
 it to the imagination, and impressing it upon the 
 heart of later generations. The Church felt at the 
 moment that it was especially in her interest that 
 the gallant deed was done, and the Church in gene- 
 ral, but the Church of Eome more particularly, has 
 drawn, it must be confessed, some audacious corol- 
 laries from it. The name of the holy Ambrose has 
 been constantly made use of as a battle-cry against 
 the civil power. If his example has sometimes 
 encouraged churchmen to brave and noble efforts in 
 resistance to secular tyranny, it has too often served, 
 and in no less degree, to screen the encroachments of 
 ambition, of violence, and of personal rancour ; too 
 often even good princes have had to curse both 
 the arrogance of Ambrose and the submissiveness 
 of Theodosius. It has been remarked that Pope 
 Innocent IV. thus cited the example of Theodosius 
 to the devout Saint Louis, the eldest son of the 
 
SL Amdrose, 39 
 
 Church, and at the same time to his excommunicated 
 opponent, the second Frederic of Grermany. It was 
 precisely in the spirit of Ambrose that the Patriarch 
 of Jerusalem had laid an interdict on the church which 
 this wilful prince had dared to enter. There can be 
 no doubt that the famous exploit of the Bishop of 
 Milan sowed the seed of that spiritual arrogance 
 which, issuing forth here and there in many lands 
 and in divers ages, has fructified in the organised 
 assumptions of the Church of Eome, and so strongly 
 coloured the history of mediaeval and modern Europe. 
 These assumptions have been encountered, as we 
 know, by the indignant resistance of princes and 
 peoples, so as to give to the general course of Chris- 
 tian progress the appearance of a continual struggle ; 
 so as to set the secular interests of human nature in 
 constant opposition to the spiritual claims upon them, 
 to exasperate the temper of both the rival claimants, 
 to persuade the laity that the Church has no just 
 authority, the churchmen that its authority has no 
 limits. Possibly, if Ambrose had foreseen the super- 
 structure of priestly aggression which has been raised 
 on the foundation he thus blindly laid, he might 
 have modified an act which was destined to produce 
 such questionable results ; which has set in many 
 
40 S^. Amdrose. 
 
 minds the idea of the Church and of reconciliation 
 with the Church, before that of God and of recon- 
 ciliation with God ; and has recommended formalism 
 and unreality to the men of formal and unreal 
 character who have never failed to abound among us. 
 Nevertheless, let us not deny his just title to our 
 admiration for his noble spirit and loyalty to the 
 faith he preached. Let us not grudge him the glory 
 he has acquired throughout Christendom for the 
 ideal of Christian order which he was the first to 
 blazon to the world. Doubtless it was well that the 
 first signal act of authority on the part of the 
 Christian ministry, on its attaining a public position, 
 should be directed, not against the obscure failings 
 of private individuals, but against the notorious 
 crime of the secular governor. The attention of all 
 mankind was thus drawn at once to the new princi- 
 ples which laid claim to their devout veneration, and 
 from henceforth Christianity could not fail to com- 
 mand their awe and sway their fears and aspirations. 
 We must remark, indeed, some inconsistency in 
 the timidity with which the same monitor who had 
 rebuked the sin of Theodosius shrank from any 
 reflection, as we have seen, upon that of Arbogastes, 
 the murderer of Valentinian. Some critics, contrasting 
 
SL Amh^ose. 41 
 
 his attitude in the one case and in the other, have 
 ventured to insinuate that he must have received 
 a previous assurance that the Emperor would not 
 resent his boldness ; the striking scene between them 
 was no more, they imagine, than a theatrical per- 
 formance arranged for some common object. But 
 this far-fetched supposition does not commend itself 
 to any serious attention. It might be enough 
 perhaps to reply that after all Theodosius was known 
 to be a civilised man, a religious man, and a 
 Christian believer, whereas Arbogastes was a bar- 
 barian, of no religion at all. It might be easier to 
 be firm and even bold with the one than with the 
 the other. But we cannot enter further into circum- 
 stances of which we have no real knowledge. Histo- 
 rical conjecture or divination may be the/o?'^e of a 
 Tacitus or a Niebuhr ; but it is the foible of too many 
 lesser historians. Let us be content, then, with what 
 we do know, and remember that Theodosius is a pro- 
 minent character in Roman and Christian history, 
 who has not failed to leave distinct traces of his own 
 individuality, and at the same time to throw light 
 upon the temper of his contemporaries and of the age 
 in which they lived. 
 
 Ambrose, it may be presumed, was well aware 
 
42 S^. Ambrose. 
 
 that this great captain and administrator was a man 
 of strong character, and resolute in carrying out the 
 views on which his mind was fixed. * He knew that 
 Theodosius was not only a Christian on conviction, 
 but a believer who accepted the Church as the in- 
 terpreter of the Christian Scriptures, and based the 
 authority of the Church upon primitive traditions. 
 These were his vouchers for the orthodox or Atha- 
 nasian theology ; and he presented himself accord- 
 ingly to the Christian world as the champion of the 
 Trinitarian against the Arian section of believers, 
 which had been during the last half century pretty 
 equally balanced. Zealous himself in vindication of 
 the orthodox theory, he was disposed to regard the 
 great divines who maintained it with especial vene- 
 ration ; to esteem them highly for their work's sake, 
 as divinely appointed defenders of the Faith ; to in- 
 vest their language and acts with the character of a 
 Divine revelation. We may well believe that such 
 an enthusiast would see in the bold rebuke of the 
 Bishop of Milan a dispensation from on High, and 
 feel himself honoured rather than humiliated by so 
 special an intervention of the Head of the Church to 
 which he had devoted himself. He withdrew, I 
 would say, elated rather than abashed from the door 
 
S/. Ambrose. 43 
 
 which was closed so rudely in his face ; he underwent 
 his penance of eight months' exclusion apparently 
 without a murmur ; he continued throughout to re- 
 gard the minister of Divine justice with awe and un- 
 failing obedience ; he persevered in the policy on which 
 he had already entered, of discrediting and repressing, 
 though not without hesitation and reserve, the mani- 
 festations of Paganism throughout the Empire.^ 
 
 There is a consideration which deserves to be 
 
 ^ Bnngener, Seances Histmnques a Geneve, 1858, page 190. 
 ' En louant magnifiquement le z61e de Theodose Ambroise 
 entendait moins le remercier de ce qu'il avait fait, que le 
 pousser ^ faire davantage. Le nom de Theodose n'en a pas 
 moins ete invoque depuis, toutes les fois qu'il s'est agi de louer 
 des persecuteurs ou de pousser a la persecution ; ses lois contre 
 les pa'iens ont fait verser des torrents de sang dans I'eglise. Ce 
 n'etait pas assez du Theodose de I'histoire ; on a fait un 
 Theodose ideal, plus absolu, plus cruel que ne fut jamais le 
 veritable, et c'est celui-14 que Rome a propose toutes les fois 
 qu'elle le pouvait ou I'osait, a I'imitation des souverains. 
 NuUe difference, sur ce point, entre la Rome ultramontaine et 
 la Rome d'autre pays. Quand Innocent III. pousse 4 I'extermi- 
 nation des Albigeois, — Theodose, Theodose ! Quand les eveques 
 d'Angleterre poussent Henri VIII. Catholique 4 1 'extermination 
 des Lutheriens du pays, — Theodose, Theodose ! Quand Leon X. 
 pousse Frangois I. ^ I'extermination des Lutheriens en France, — 
 Theodose ! Quand Bossuet, enfin, cel^bre Louis XIV. — Theodose, 
 Theodose ! . . . Et c'est pour meriter ce titre que le nouveau 
 Theodose poursuivra impitoyablement son oeuvre, plus dur et de 
 beaucoup, contre les malheureux Chretiens, que ne fut 1 'autre 
 jadis, contre les pa'iens et le paganisme. Rome excelle a tirer 
 parti d'un nom pour etablir ou amplifier un principe.' 
 
44 ^^' Ambrose. 
 
 borne in mind when we read of the suppression of 
 the Pagan rites and the services of the temples. The 
 endowments of the temples throughout the Empire, 
 numerous and wealthy as they were, had been for 
 the most part assigned to individuals charged with 
 defraying the necessary expenses. So far these en- 
 dowments were similar in principle to those which 
 have been commonly provided throughout Christen- 
 dom for the ministers of the Christian churches. 
 But in Christian lands these ministers form a class 
 apart, a profession which has generally been but 
 slenderly provided with private means, and which 
 accordingly has exercised little influence in State 
 affairs, except in the case of mediaeval bishops and 
 abbots. In the Pagan Empire the case was very 
 different. There it was the nobles and great secular 
 personages who enjoyed for the most part the funds 
 appropriated to religious objects. There existed no 
 clerical profession of religious teachers ; but certain 
 families, in many cases the most powerful of the 
 governing class, were often the hereditary guardians 
 of certain temples. They were especially charged 
 by law, or a common understanding derived from 
 ancient tradition, with the maintenance of special 
 services, not for the spiritual benefit of individual 
 
vSV. Ambrose. 45 
 
 worshippers, but in the interest of the public and 
 for the safety of the commonwealth. Now it is one 
 thing to disendow a class, such as the modern clergy, 
 for the most part poor and humble, and of little 
 secular repute, and quite another to carry out such a 
 process against a large and powerful body of high 
 families, and the most distinguished personages in 
 the realm. It seems clear that, as might indeed be 
 expected, the earliest edicts for the confiscation of 
 the temple-endowments under Gratian, big and stern 
 as they look in the codes or statute-book, were prac- 
 tically of little effect. If many temples were really 
 closed, as we may readily believe, though certainly 
 by no means all or the greater number of them, we 
 must suppose that the lordly holders of their pro- 
 perty contrived to retain the enjoyment of the funds, 
 while they, not unwillingly perhaps, relieved them- 
 selves from the services for which these funds had 
 been originally given. Theodosius found the Pagan 
 priesthood despoiled of their wealth in name only, 
 and however earnest he might be in his Christian 
 profession, he long abstained, both in policy and 
 mercy, from asserting the full authority of previous 
 enactments. He prudently made a distinction be- 
 tween the property attached to the temples and that 
 
46 Si. Ambi^ose. 
 
 which was appropriated to the maintenance of the 
 popular ganaes and shows. If he allowed the first 
 to be sacrificed, he withdrew the latter more gradu- 
 ally and partially. The ministers of the temples 
 could be propitiated by the share of the spoil which 
 he suffered to fall to their lot. The Emperor took him- 
 self, like our King Henry, a large part of these estates, 
 a part he devoted to the maintenance of his soldiers, 
 another he gave or sold to friends and flatterers. Means 
 are not wanting for facilitating the work of disendow- 
 ing the most powerful corporations and interests, such 
 as have been found more than once in om* own history, 
 and may be brought into operation again. The Pagan 
 orator Libanius has certified, like our pious Spel- 
 man, to such as are disposed to credit the phenomenon, 
 that all those who allowed themselves to profit by 
 sacrilege under the earlier edict of Constantius, 
 perished miserably. Nevertheless, it would seem 
 that the Pagans themselves were not deterred from 
 seeking their personal emolument by the later confis- 
 cations of Gratian and Theodosius. It is remarkable 
 that the priesthoods of the Pagan superstitions, the 
 old observance, as it came now to be commonly called, 
 though despoiled of their endowments, did not 
 quickly cease to be objects of attraction, and especi- 
 
S^. Ambrose, 47 
 
 ally, it is said, in the provinces. They still conferred, 
 it would seem, some social distinction, which repaid 
 the expenses which were imposed upon them, and 
 tempted, strange to say, even Christians to solicit 
 them. The Emperor thundered against this scandal, 
 yet even Christians were known to evade his decrees 
 by apostatising from the Faith. Theodosius replied 
 by pronouncing such wretches legally infamous. Still 
 encouraged and urged forward by the dominant party, 
 he narrowed more and more the limits of Pagan 
 liberty, and finally decreed the penalty of death for 
 the performance of any act of Pagan sacrifice. The 
 execution of the law might still be imperfect, but 
 its animus was held to be satisfactory. Both Con- 
 stantine and Theodosius may be raised in history to 
 heroic proportions, but it was not for their secular so 
 much as for their ecclesiastical achievements that 
 they were hailed with the illustrious title of the 
 Great. 
 
 The Imperial legislation on the subject of the 
 Pagan superstitions, from Grratian to Honorius — so 
 much of it at least as has been collected together in 
 the Corpus of the Eoman Law before Justinian — is 
 contained in the tenth title or chapter of the Six- 
 teenth Book. The progress which Theodosius made 
 
48 S^. Ambrose. 
 
 in accomplishing the object of suppressing idolatry 
 may there be traced step by step. It culminated, as 
 far as these documents show, in the decree of the 
 year 392 just mentioned. It has been asserted, 
 indeed, that this pious prince took a still further 
 "tride in the same direction in commanding the 
 actual overthrow of the Pagan temples. But no 
 such law can be traced in our records, and it seems 
 more probable that it was pretended only, as an 
 excuse for the irregular violence which was exercised 
 in divers places against the most conspicuous monu- 
 ments of the proscribed faith. The images of the 
 gods shared the fate of their shrines. ' The colossal 
 statue of Serapis,' says Gribbon, in a well-known 
 passage of his 'History,' 'was involved in the ruin 
 of his temple and religion. ... It was confidently 
 affirmed that, if any impious hand should dare to 
 violate the majesty of the god, the heavens and the 
 earth would instantly return to their original chaos. 
 An intrepid soldier, animated by zeal and armed 
 with a weighty battle-axe, ascended the ladder ; and 
 even the Christian multitude expected with some 
 anxiety the event of the combat. He aimed a 
 vigorous stroke against the cheek of Serapis ; the 
 cheek fell to the ground ; the thunder was silent, 
 
Sif. Ambrose. ^g 
 
 and both the heavens and the earth continued to pre- 
 serve their accustomed order and tranquillity. The 
 victorious soldier repeated his blows ; the huge idol 
 was overthrown and broken in pieces, and the limbs 
 of Serapis were ignominiously dragged through the 
 streets of Alexandria. His mangled carcase was 
 burnt in the amphitheatre, amidst the shouts of the 
 populace; and many persons attributed their eon- 
 version to this discovery of the impotence of their 
 tutelar deity. . . . After the fall of Serapis some 
 hopes were still entertained by the Pagans that the 
 Nile would refuse his annual supply to the impious 
 masters of Egypt, . . . but the delay was soon 
 compensated by the rapid swell of the waters.' 
 
 This striking incident was repeated no doubt 
 with the same effect in hundreds of instances through- 
 out the world-wide Empire, though still more fre- 
 quently in the East than in the West. In Graul and 
 Spain, in Italy, and at Eome itself, the ancient local 
 traditions lingered more persistently, and popular 
 opinion was generally too strong for the law, and 
 even for the zeal of the triumphant votaries of the 
 new faith. But by the grace of Providence at the 
 overthrow of the Pagan institutions, a fresh, a 
 vigorous, and a true belief was already widely dis- 
 
 E 
 
50 S^. Ambrose. 
 
 seminated, and was prepared to take their place, and 
 receive into its bosom the dismayed devotees of the 
 fallen superstitions. The multitude, on ceasing to 
 be Pagan, became readily Christian, in name at least 
 and outward usage. The disendowment of the tem- 
 ples was compensated by the endowment of the 
 churches. The temples themselves were in nume- 
 rous instances transformed, with little change in their 
 fabrics or decorations, into churches, and the revenues 
 which had been appropriated to them by the muni- 
 ficence of past generations were, if not already 
 alienated, not unfrequently transferred to their suc- 
 cessors. The piety of liberal churchmen was stimu- 
 lated to complete the requisite dotation ; the devotion 
 of tithes to Grod's service was encouraged, and urged 
 as an act of piety. All classes vied with each other 
 in pouring their wealth into the Church as the 
 general depository of the public alms and thank- 
 offerings. From the era of St. Ambrose, who together 
 with his patron passed away before the close of this 
 century of religious revolution, dates the final settle- 
 ment of our Faith throughout the Empire as the 
 acknowledged director of the human conscience. As 
 the old religion of Pagan Kome had been esteemed 
 the guardian and pledge of the fortunes of the com- 
 
S^. Aiitbrose. 
 
 monwealth, so was it now and henceforth with the 
 new religion derived from Christ and his Apostles. 
 Such was the union of Church and State, cemented 
 by the popular imagination rather than by any 
 formal and technical procedure. Enough that the 
 Emperor, the ruler of the State, was henceforth a 
 Christian by profession ; that all his public and 
 private acts were sanctified by Christian devotions ; 
 that he convened, and directed in his own person, the 
 councils of Christian divines for the decision of theo- 
 logical questions ; that in many cases he appointed 
 the chief prelates of the Christian community ; that 
 the rank and revenues of bishops and priests were 
 secured to them by the law of the Empire, while the 
 ministers of every false religion were impoverished 
 and degraded ; that the laws and institutions of the 
 State were gradually, and at least partially, con- 
 formed to the prescriptions of Christian morality. 
 The legislation of Church and State, thus combined 
 and mutually influencing one another, carried on 
 more efficiently the humaner principles which had 
 already broken the hard crust of the ancient juris- 
 prudence. Some immunities and securities were 
 granted to the unfortunate class of slaves, with whose 
 bondage the antique world, neither Pagan nor 
 
 K 2 
 
52 S^. Ambrose. 
 
 Christian, could dispense. The use of torture was 
 abolished or limited. The cruel combats of the 
 gladiators were discouraged at least by the awakened 
 Christian conscience, even before they were finally 
 suppressed by Christian law. But the most marked 
 advance in Christian sentiment was manifested, first, 
 in the universal diffusion of religious and moral 
 teaching in churches planted in every town and 
 village, and again in the respect paid to women, and 
 to pureness of living in either sex. The Church and 
 State were thus practically united; they lived and 
 moved in harmony together. God Himself, to all 
 human appearance, had joined them together ; the 
 compact, it might well be supposed, was complete 
 and enduring, and no one henceforth should put it 
 asunder. It should be added that, with her prosperity 
 the Church recovered the primitive spirit of tolera- 
 tion, which in her recent struggles she was on the 
 point of losing. Paganism, defeated and discredited, 
 was allowed to die out from its own falsehood, — and 
 it continued dying for some centuries at least, — per- 
 haps, in some sense, it is not yet dead altogether in 
 the midst of us. 
 
LECTURE II. 
 
 ST. AUGUSTINE : SOME LESSONS FROM HIS LIFE AND 
 TEACHING. 
 
 I HAVE already chosen St. Ambrose for the central 
 figure of my sketch of the outward, the objective, 
 the visible Church of the century which followed 
 upon the conversion of Constantino. It was desirable 
 for the purpose of these elementary Lectures on our 
 early ecclesiastical history to take another similar 
 figure to represent the leading characteristics of the 
 inner life of the Church, its religious views and 
 sentiments, during nearly the same important period. 
 For this object no more suitable personage presents 
 himself than he who is regarded by common consent 
 as the greatest of the Christian Fathers, the most 
 illustrious, I may perhaps say, of all Christian 
 thinners, the most learned, for his time the most 
 enlightened, let me add, the most spiritually minded 
 of the early Church, St. Augustine. 
 
 As Bishop of an obscure diocese in Africa, far 
 
54 '^^' Augitstine. 
 
 removed from Eome or Constantinople, this eminent 
 divine could not appeal efifectually to the hearts of 
 men from the circumstance of his mere outward 
 position. His vast influence was altogether personal 
 with his own generation, and such it has continued 
 with all that have followed. It was gained, and it 
 has been ever since largely maintained, by the uni- 
 versality of his learning, the prodigious activity with 
 which he circulated his views of faith and practice, 
 the constancy with which he defended the Catholic 
 doctrines, the energy with which he repelled the 
 attacks of heretics and unbelievers, the subtilty, 
 we may add, with which he contrived to enlist the 
 philosophic views of morality in the cause of the 
 Gospel. In an age of abundant theological science 
 Augustine was something more than a theologian ; 
 in an age of superabundant theological pedantry he 
 was less than any divine of his own day — than most 
 of any day— a pedant. We may almost regard it as 
 specially providential that the early career by which a 
 character so signal was developed should be preserved 
 to us in full detail in the remarkable work by which 
 Augustine is still most popularly known, the ' Con- 
 fessions,' which constitute his moral autobiography. 
 It is from this book that we derive, in the first 
 
6V. Atigustine. 55 
 
 place, almost all that we know of the writer's per- 
 sonal history, and with this his mental and spiritual 
 growth are so closely connected that we may carry 
 on our review of the two pretty nearly together. 
 
 We begin by marking the date of Augustine's 
 birth in the year 353, about ten years later than that 
 of Ambrose, about forty years after the first recog- 
 nition of Christianity by Constantino. His birth- 
 place was Tagaste, a small town in Numidia ; his 
 parents were of humble origin. The Christian popu- 
 lation of the district derived their culture from 
 Carthage, the third and almost the second city of 
 the Empire,^ abounding at the time in schools of 
 every kind of learning, and the home of many diverse 
 sects of philosophical opinion ; but there was no 
 region in which the Gospel had made more progress 
 than that which had been illustrated by the virtues 
 of Cyprian, as well as by the genius of Tertullian. 
 For some centuries Northern Africa, the modern 
 Tunis and Algeria, the paradise of the Pax Romana, 
 was perhaps the most favoured portion of the world 
 
 ' Ausonius, after placing Rome first, says of this city, 
 
 ' Constantinopoli assurgit Carthago priori, 
 Non toto cessura gradu, quia tertia dici 
 Fastidit, nou ausa locum sperare secundum, 
 Qui fuit ambarum.' 
 
56 » SL Augustine. 
 
 in wealth and tranquillity ; the birth of Augustine 
 at Tagaste took place many years before this happy 
 epoch had begun to be overclouded by the threat of 
 invasion from the North. 
 
 Patricius, Augustine's father, was, it seems, origi- 
 nally a Pagan, a man of indifferent character and of 
 no personal distinction. The future Saint inherited 
 all the better part of his own nature from his mother, 
 Monica, illustrious as the first example in Christian 
 history, if we except the Eunice of St. Paul's Epistle, 
 of the blessed influence of the mother in moulding 
 the character of the beloved offspring to the highest 
 Christian model. Few figures of the ancient Church 
 seem more familiar to us than that of the pious 
 mother of Augustine ; and it deserves our regard 
 and veneration as the G^ospel type of female virtue, 
 which bears in itself a touching testimony to the 
 truth of the Christian revelation. Monica is said to 
 have converted her husband in his later years, and 
 thus to have secured the privilege of devoting herself 
 to imbuing their child with her own religious aspira- 
 tions. She gave the young Augustine his first lessons 
 in Christian obedience, and taught him to look to her 
 with devotion and confidence as a blessed example of 
 the effects of a Christian confession; but it was not 
 
St Augustine. 57 
 
 imperative to bring the infant, or even the young 
 child, to the font, and enrol him in his tender years 
 under the sign or banner of the Cross. Augustine 
 had reached the stage of early manhood, and he was 
 not yet baptized. Leaving his early home, after 
 the death of his father, he carried with him, as he 
 tells us, merely some vague ideas of the faith of the 
 Christian disciples ; he retained in his soul no more 
 than an echo of the name of Christ, which he had 
 heard so often uttered by his mother's lips, but an 
 echo which continued to vibrate ever and anon 
 through the many years of doubt and perplexity 
 which were to elapse before he became himself, by 
 the grace of Grod and through his mother's prayers, 
 not almost but altogether a Christian. 
 
 The 'Confessions of St, Augustine ' present us with 
 a signal instance of the self-conscious, self-accusing, 
 self-tormenting spirit which breathes, through all 
 ages, in the autobiographical records of converts to 
 a vital faith. We are well aware how often this 
 spirit is exaggerated and perverted, and how little 
 reliance can be placed even on the particular details 
 upon which it delights to expatiate. Such a spirit 
 is indeed rather a matter of temperament than of 
 reason and reflection, and while it merits our tender 
 
58 Si Attgustme. 
 
 and even reverential regard, we must ever guard 
 against the interest which it is only too well calculated 
 to inspire. We remember, not without an awful sense 
 of the self-humiliation which such repentance should 
 engender, how the holy Apostle declared of himself 
 that he was ' the chief of sinners.' We must not be 
 surprised then to hear the vehement self-reproaches 
 of Augustine when he refers again and again to the 
 failings of his own conduct in the early years which 
 he lays open to us. Certainly, we have no reason to 
 doubt that, as he piteously declares, he showed himself 
 in unthinking youth a careless libertine. Doubtless 
 he yielded, as he persists in declaring, to the violent 
 passions so common to the early years of which he 
 speaks, surrounded as they were in his case with 
 more than common temptations. The African 
 Paganism which he witnessed about him, and from 
 which he was not sheltered by the training and 
 discipline of the Christian Church, partook of the 
 dissoluteness of Asia and Syria, from whence it 
 sprung. He was surrounded by the worship of 
 nature, of the elemental deities which represented 
 and pretended to glorify the natural appetites ; by 
 the worship of Belus and Astarte, which had long 
 lost among the vulgar herd of their votaries what- 
 
St Augustine. 59 
 
 ever spiritual sense might have been once attached 
 to it by heads and hearts of the better kind. 
 Augustine confesses that he was led away by carnal 
 weakness; he stooped to sins of impurity; he con- 
 tracted at a very early age an illicit sexual connexion ; 
 but even that sinful self-surrender may have protected 
 him from a career of vulgar debauchery ; for of none 
 such does he accuse himself, as he surely would have 
 done without disguise if his conscience had wit- 
 nessed against him. No — we may be sure that our 
 holy Father was not a man to yield to the grosser 
 forms of sin; and from the first he strove against 
 his temptations by devoting himself to study, to the 
 acquisition of knowledge, to the full employment of 
 his mind and ever-active imagination. He still 
 longs for the food meet for his soul. He yearns for 
 wisdom; but as yet it is the wisdom of this world 
 only which he seeks in divers studies, but especially 
 in the study of rhetoric, which was the passport then, 
 as since, to worldly distinctions of many kinds. 
 Nevertheless, professor of rhetoric though he has 
 become, he is still unsatisfied. He now sighs for 
 belief ; he requires a creed on which to stay himself. 
 He looks about him; he feels about him restlessly; 
 but he has not learnt to fix his mind on any one 
 
6o SL Augustine. 
 
 thing with sufficient steadiness. He is disappointed, 
 as all half-seekers after a creed will surely be, and 
 disappointment in his fervid nature soon turns to 
 impatience, impatience to despair. And then he 
 plunges into worldly amusements to relieve the void 
 in his spiritual aspirations. He frequents the 
 theatre and the circus, which in those days could 
 only furnish fresh fuel for the passions. But his 
 nature is too good to be thus satisfied. On the 
 contrary, he shrinks with genuine horror from the 
 moral intoxication of the shows, of which he has 
 given us a notable account in the case of a com- 
 panion who had like himself experienced it. 
 
 He is speaking of his very intimate friend 
 Alypius, who occupies a large part of the story of 
 his early life, its yearnings and its struggles. This 
 young man, he tells us, had gone before him to 
 study law at Eome, and was there carried away with 
 excessive eagerness to the combats of the gladiators. 
 ' For,' to quote the Confessions, ' being utterly averse 
 from, and detesting such spectacles, he met one day 
 by chance certain of his acquaintance and fellow- 
 students coming from dinner, and they with a 
 familiar violence haled him, refusing and resisting, 
 into the amphitheatre, during the progress of those 
 
S^. Atigustine. 6i 
 
 deadly entertainments. Again and again did he 
 protest, " Though you drag my body there, and there 
 set me down, you cannot force me to turn eyes or 
 mind upon those horrors. I shall then be absent 
 even while I am present, and so shall overcome both 
 you and them." They, hearing this, bore him on 
 nevertheless, desiroas perhaps to try that very thing, 
 whether he could do as he pretended. When they 
 had arrived and had taken their places as they could, 
 the whole place kindled with the savage pastime. 
 But he, closing the passages of his eyes, forbade his 
 mind to range abroad, — and would that he had 
 stopped his ears also ! For in the fight when one 
 fell, a mighty cry of the whole people striking him 
 strongly, overcome by curiosity, and prepared as it 
 were to despise and rise superior to the scene what- 
 ever it might be, even when disclosed to him, he 
 opened his eyes, and was at once stricken with a 
 deeper wound in his soul than was the other in his 
 body, and he fell more miserably than he on whose 
 fall that mighty noise was raised. . . . For as soon as 
 he saw that blood he therewith drank in savaseness, 
 nor turned he away, but fixed his eyes upon it, frenzied 
 unawares, and was delighted with the wicked fight, 
 intoxicated with the bloody pastime. Why say 
 
62 S^. Augustine. 
 
 more? He beheld, he shouted, he caught fire; he 
 carried thence with him the madness which should 
 goad him to return, not with them only who had 
 first drawn him thither, but even before them, — 
 yea, and to draw in others.' How evidently genuine 
 a narrative! How true to our common nature I 
 Have we not read precisely like accounts of the 
 experience of countrymen of our own who have 
 been enticed to witness the scenes of a Spanish bull- 
 fight? How much might we learn of the manners, the 
 thoughts, the hearts of antiquity, and how like they 
 were to our own in all their diversity, had the Fathers 
 indulged us with a few more such simple narratives ! 
 How many of their sermons might we have spared 
 for them! And, lastly, have we not all felt more 
 or less of this common human infirmity in the 
 experience of our own early days at college or else- 
 where ? Do we not begin to realize that Alypius 
 was one of ourselves, that the great Augustine him- 
 self was after all one of om*selves also? 
 
 Perhaps this common likeness may be brouglit 
 even more home to us by another anecdote taken 
 from these candid Confessions. The writer is still 
 speaking of the sins of his early youth, his sins of 
 impurity, but still more of carelessness and vanity : 
 
vSy. Augustine, 63 
 
 ' And in all,' he exclaims solemnly, ' was a mist 
 intercepting from me, God, the brightness of Thy 
 Truth ; and mine iniquity burst out from very ful- 
 ness.' And he goes on to make a more special dis- 
 closiu-e. ' Theft,' he says, ' is punished by Thy Law, 
 Lord, and the Law written in men's hearts, which 
 iniquity doth not efface. . . . Yet I lusted after 
 theft, and I thieved, not compelled by hunger or 
 poverty ; for I stole that of which I had enough and 
 much better. Nor cared I to enjoy that which I 
 stole, but took pleasure in the theft for the very sin's 
 sake, and that only. A pear-tree there was hard by 
 our vineyard, laden with fruit, tempting neither for 
 colour nor taste. To shake this and rob it, some 
 lewd fellows among us went late one night, and took 
 huge loads, not for eating, but to fling to the very 
 hogs after merely tasting them. And this out of 
 mere wantonness — to do what we lusted to do, just 
 because it was wrong to do it. Behold my heart, 
 
 Grod, — behold my heart which Thou hadst pity 
 upon in the bottomless pit ! Foul was the deed, and 
 
 1 loved it ; I loved to perish ; — I loved mine own 
 fault, not seeking aught through shame, but simply 
 the very shame itself.' Some of my hearers may 
 remember to have read in a book now almost for- 
 
64 SL Augustine. 
 
 gotten, and not undeservedly so — Kichard Froude's 
 ' Eemains ' — how bitterly he accuses himself, and in a 
 strain how like to this, of having eaten a bit of roast 
 goose on some occasion when he fancies he should 
 not have so indulged himself. Such scrupulosity in 
 matters so trivial is common enough among us, and 
 generally indicates not a sound but a weakly con- 
 science. It forms the staple of many tender-hearted 
 confessions of men who have never risen above it ; 
 but in Augustine it was combined with, and even- 
 tually overruled by a stronger will and a juster 
 appreciation of the whole duty of Man. In another 
 man it would have been little worthy of our atten- 
 tion. 
 
 But the course of our Saint's autobiography 
 requires me to refer to other charges which he 
 makes against himself, still of a trifling and what we 
 may surely call a venial character ; and we can only 
 regret that, if they were worth recording at all, he 
 should paint them in colours so flagrant. Thus he 
 cries and groans again, still speaking of his youthful 
 errors : — ' Stage plays also carried me away, full of 
 images of my own miseries and of fuel for my fire.' 
 Not that he is denouncing the theatre as the hotbed, 
 as it then really was, of heathenism or licentiousness, 
 
S^, Augustine. 65 
 
 but simply as pampering the imagination. ' Why is 
 it,' he asks, 'that man desires to be made sad, 
 beholding things dolefid and tragical, which yet he 
 would by no means wish himself to suffer ? Yet he 
 desires to feel sorrow at them as a spectator only. 
 This he makes his pleasure ; but what is this but a 
 wretched madness ? For when he suffers in his own 
 person, then indeed he calls it pain and sorrow ; but 
 when he compassionates others, then forsooth it is 
 pity or mercy. And what sort of compassion is this 
 for feigned and scenic sufferings, when the hearer 
 is not asked to relieve but to grieve only ? And if 
 the sorrows of these tragic heroes, whether of history 
 or fiction, be so ill-portrayed that he is not moved 
 to tears, lo ! he goes away dissatisfied ; but if he be 
 moved to passion, he stays, he looks on intently, 
 he actually weeps for pleasure.' Now this idea, so 
 obvious and commonplace, which all moralists from 
 Horace downwards have lightly touched on, does 
 Augustine continue to work upon and exaggerate, 
 till it seems in his eyes to demand the intervention 
 of divine Providence itself. ' But Thy faithful mercy 
 watched over me from afar, while I consumed myself 
 with such grievous iniquities, pursuing a profane 
 curiosity even to the brink of the treacherous abyss 
 
 F 
 
66 SL Augustine. 
 
 and the beguiling service of devils.' His language, 
 thus inflamed, becomes yet darker and more myste- 
 rious ; he would lead us to imagine that there is yet 
 some worse sin in the background, of which, peni- 
 tent as he is, he cannot bring himself to cleanse his 
 breast by confession. ' I dared,' he says, ' even while 
 Thy solemnities were being celebrated within Thine 
 own church, to devise and compass a business de- 
 serving death for its fruits, for which Thou scourgedst 
 me with grievous punishments, though as nothing to 
 my fault, — Thou, my exceeding Mercy, my God, 
 my Eefuge from these terrible destroyers ! ' ^ 
 
 What, then, was this dreadful business, deserving 
 death for its fruits — death in this world, or death 
 in the world to come ? What the grievous punish- 
 ments with which it was visited, though as nothing 
 in comparison with its enormity ? Can it be that 
 his mind misgave him at the last, and that these his 
 solemn confessions are no full confessions after all — 
 that he has not withheld from us his lighter errors, 
 but has kept the veil drawn over what was really 
 grave, really heinous ? All, I think, that we can 
 
 I My rendering- of the language of the Confessions is taken 
 substantially from a translation published by James Parker and 
 Co- of Oxford. 
 
S/. Atigustme. 
 
 further gather from the imperfect disclosure is that, 
 in addition to the instances of infirmity already men- 
 tioned, the good man had indulged in the vanity of 
 seeking mere human wisdom, mere human applause, 
 the vanity of taking pleasure in his success in the 
 schools, in which he became a favourite declaimer. 
 He was perhaps the spoilt child of fashion ; he was 
 flattered and intoxicated by the praises of the worth- 
 less, and even the reprobate. ' And now,' he says, ' I 
 was chief in the school of Rhetoric, whereat I rejoiced 
 proudly, and swelled with arrogance, though — Lord, 
 thou knowest — far more quiet, and far removed from 
 those subverters among whom I lived, ashamed, 
 shameless as I was, that I was not altogether like 
 unto them. With them I lived, and was sometimes 
 delighted with their friendship, whose doings I did 
 ever abhor ; for nothing can be liker the very deeds 
 of devils than theirs were.' We get, indeed, from 
 these ejaculations a very obscure idea of who these 
 subverters were. We may suppose that they were 
 the captious Sophists of the schools, at no time more 
 abounding, who took the better or the worse side 
 at random, and amused themselves with perverting 
 common sense and subverting healthy principles ; 
 such persons as we have all met and had to deal with 
 
 F 2 
 
68 kS*/. Augustifte. 
 
 in our own experience, and who have soon found their 
 just level in the estimation of most of us. Surely it 
 has been no heinous sin if we from time to time 
 have been blinded by their sophistries, have been 
 tickled by their compliments, or have trifled with 
 their seductions. May we not hope, then, that, 
 despite of these vehement self-denunciations, the 
 sins even of this youthful libertine might be blotted 
 out by the tears of the Kecording Angel ? 
 
 In studying the Confessions of the holy Augus- 
 tine, as well as of many other good men who have 
 taken them for their model, we must always guard 
 against the morbid exaggerations of a sensitive 
 nature, to countenance which the Word of Grod itself, 
 misread or misinterpreted, is too often perverted. 
 But, not to trespass here on the functions of the 
 pulpit, I will rather pause to point out the charac- 
 teristic difference between the confessions of the 
 pious Christian, be he an Augustine, a Francois de 
 Sales, a Cowper, or a Newton, and those of the most 
 devout of the Pagans before them, of such a good 
 and candid self-examiner as the Emperor Marcus 
 Antoninus. We have in the Meditations of this 
 Pagan saint the nearest counterpart to the Christian 
 effusions before us. The writers of the one book and 
 
6V. Augustine, 69 
 
 of the other were perhaps equally sincere, equally 
 devout. Both were equally impressed with a sense 
 of moral duty; both equally acknowledged their 
 responsibility to a higher spiritual Power ; Augustine 
 saw indeed a Being where Antoninus could only 
 recognise a Principle. Augustine had a clearer 
 apprehension of consequences to follow on his dis- 
 charging or failing to discharge the duties he acknow- 
 ledged. Antoninus knew neither of the reward nor 
 the punishment, even while the duty was not the 
 less present to his understanding. Accordingly, that 
 which in the mind of the Christian is a sin, appears 
 to the Pagan a defect or an infirmity. The one 
 repents, the other grieves ; the one calls on his Grod 
 to strengthen and amend him, the other falls back 
 upon his own sense and courage, and only resolves 
 to reform himself. Augustine falls on his knees and 
 prays for pardon through the unmerited mercy of a 
 reconciled Saviour. Antoninus looks only to satisfy 
 his own sense of what is just and fitting. If this he 
 cannot do — and he painfully feels that he cannot — he 
 will do his best ; and he does his best. He looks 
 neither with hope nor fear to the future, if there be 
 a future ; but his serenity — let us not call it apathy, 
 though the word bears the stamp of Zeno — is hardly 
 
70 S^. Augustine. 
 
 ruffled by the crash of the world around him. The 
 Eoman Empire is about to fall to pieces ; the Stoic 
 philosopher will work for it and fight for it, but if it 
 must fall, let it do so ! The Empire did fall to 
 pieces, in the very sight of Augustine ; we shall see 
 hereafter what the Christian Saint thought of its 
 fall, and the spiritual application he made of it. 
 
 So imperfect was the spiritual training of the 
 most spiritual among the Pagans ! Yet it was 
 through the teaching of the Grreeks — it was from the 
 schools of the Piatonists and the Stoics — that many 
 of the Christian Fathers were first led to the source 
 of true religion. Alas ! that Antoninus should have 
 wilfully rejected the hand which was held out to him 
 from Heaven, when he scorned the witness of the 
 Christians who were martyred almost in his presence ! 
 Augustine, we may say with pride, took the better 
 part. This Christian Saint was first led to Christ 
 by the study of a Pagan scripture, and he freely 
 acknowledges the obligation. The perusal of Cicero's 
 Hortensius, on which he lighted in a season of per- 
 sonal affliction on the death of a friend, kindled his 
 love of Truth ; for it spoke to him after the manner 
 of the Academics, in genial accents, of God and a 
 future life. Of course, his progress in the enquiries 
 
SL Augicstme. 71 
 
 which followed was slow and unsteady. It could not 
 be otherwise. He could not grasp divine Truth in 
 its highest form all at once. He confesses that at 
 this crisis the reading of Grod's own Word, with 
 which his heart had never been brought in contact, 
 made little impression on him. He felt some interest 
 in the simplicity of its language, some admiration 
 for it, and for the directness of its appeals to the 
 feelings and the understanding. But his heart was 
 not to be so soon touched ; the eye of the spirit was 
 not yet opened, or ratlier it glanced at first obliquely 
 from the Truth itself to the false shadows of the 
 Truth with which the way of religious enquiry is ever 
 beset. If his career was diverted from the o^rosser 
 illusions of the senses, it fell upon the more subtle 
 distractions of heresy and knowledge falsely so 
 called. 
 
 The record of this fervent Christian's specula- 
 tions should be deeply interesting and instructive to 
 all who in an age of intellectual training are called 
 on to pursue the studies upon which an intelligent 
 belief must ultimately rest. ' This book ' (the Hor- 
 tensius), he says, 'diverted my affection and turned 
 my prayers from the desire of worldly distinction, of 
 distinction especially in worldly knowledge, to Thine 
 
72 6^/. Augustine. 
 
 own self, Lord I Every vain hope became at once 
 worthless to me, and I longed with incredible ardour 
 for a new life of wisdom ; and now T began to rise 
 up that I might return unto Thee. For it was 
 not to sharpen my tongue that I employed that 
 book of Cicero ; nor did it infuse into me its style, 
 but its matter. How did I then burn to remount 
 from earthly things unto Thee ! Nor knew I 
 what Thou wouldst do with me; for with Thee is 
 wisdom. And since at that time apostolic Scrip- 
 ture had not yet been made known to me, I 
 was delighted with that exhortation to philo- 
 sophy so far only, that I was thereby roused and 
 inflamed to love, seek, and obtain, not this or that 
 opinion, but wisdom itself whatsoever it were. And 
 this alone checked me, thus enkindled, that the 
 name of Christ was not in the book. For this name, 
 according to Thy mercy, my Lord, this name of 
 my Saviour thy Son had my tender heart, even with 
 my mother's milk, devoutly drunk in and deeply 
 treasured ; and whatsoever was without that name, 
 though never so learned, polished, or true, took not 
 entire hold of me.' For such was the simple ele- 
 ment of religion which the young Augustine had 
 received from his mother, herself but an uninstructed 
 
SL Augustine. ']t^ 
 
 believer ; such was the superficial training of multi- 
 tudes in those days of rudimentary Christianity. 
 And is not such the slender training of multitudes 
 even in our own day, after all the Christian ages that 
 have passed ? Yet, as we see, it was something, and 
 it carried with it the capacity for fuller development, 
 but not all at once. 
 
 ' I resolved then,' he continues, ' to bend my 
 mind to the Holy Scriptures, that I might see what 
 they really were,. And, lo ! I discover a thing not 
 understood of the proud, not laid open to children, 
 lowly in its access, in its recesses lofty and veiled 
 with mysteries ; and I was not such an one as could 
 enter into it, nor stoop my neck to follow its leading. 
 For not as I now speak did I then feel when I first 
 turned to those Scriptures ; but their style seemed 
 to me unworthy to be compared with the stateliness 
 of Tully ; for my swelling pride shrunk from their 
 holiness, nor could my sharp wit pierce to the 
 interior thereof. , . . So it was that I fell among 
 men proudly doting, exceeding carnal, trifling, and 
 prating, in whose mouth were the snares of the devil, 
 limed only with the syllables of Thy name, Father, 
 and of the Lord Jesus Christ, and of the Holy Grhost 
 the Paraclete. These names departed not out of 
 
74 ^^' AugtLstine. 
 
 their mouths, but so far forth as the sound only, for 
 their hearts were void of truth. Yet they cried out. 
 Truth, Truth ! and discoursed niuch thereof in my 
 ears. But they spake falsehood not of Thee only, 
 who truly art the Truth, but even of those ele- 
 ments of this world which are Thy creatures. Thus 
 to one hungering after Thee they served up the sun 
 and moon' (meaning objects of elemental worship), 
 ' beautiful works of Thine, but yet Thy ivorks only, 
 not Thine own self ; no, nor Thy chief works. For 
 Thy spiritual works are superior to the material, 
 celestial though these too be and brilliant. But I 
 was hungering and thirsting after Thee, Thine ownself 
 — the Truth — in whom is no variableness, neither 
 shadow of turning.' 
 
 The vague speculations on divine things into 
 which the earnest enquirer was thus led could not 
 fail to group, to crystallise themselves, as it were, in 
 some formal system of belief. The time was favour- 
 able to the rapid generation of crude opinion on 
 spiritual matters. The old mythology of the Pagan 
 world was dying or even dead ; but the field it had 
 quitted, the insatiable void in the human heart 
 which demands a belief of some sort, had given birth 
 to many theories, each of which held out to some, at 
 
S^. Azigustine. 75 
 
 some times, bright hopes of satisfaction. The reli- 
 gious tendencies of the day looked to some means of 
 reconciliation between the elements of ancient belief 
 and of prevailing scepticism. Heresy, or the wilful 
 handling of Divine Scripture, exercised great powers 
 of seduction over the hearts of really earnest thinkers 
 at a period when ideas were thus confused and inter- 
 mingled. Heresy became the ally and interpreter 
 of Paganism. She soothed the pride of philosophy 
 in substituting salvation through so-called knowledge^ 
 or the inner lig'ht, for salvation through conversion 
 and fcelf-humiliation. Thus it was that the G-nostic 
 heresy pretended to be the science of religion. 
 Looking into human nature as discovered to us by 
 experience, it undertook to demonstrate the truths 
 of religion by their conformity thereto. Manicheism, 
 a form of Grnosticism with which the Christian 
 Fathers maintained the closest struggle, combined 
 the Fire-worship of Persia with some fragments of 
 the Grospel only, and those picked out arbitrarily 
 from the Divine Scriptures, It conceived of the 
 world as a kingdom of light stretched alongside of 
 a conterminous realm of darkness. Between these 
 two spheres of the universe there raged eternal war- 
 fare. Such was the general theory of the Manicheans, 
 
76 SL Augustine. 
 
 and they went on further to explain it thus : — Dark- 
 ness, assisted by the agency of demons, has invaded 
 the region of light, and man is ever subject to their 
 contending influence. Christ and the Paraclete are 
 come down from the Sun to teach us how to reject 
 the element of darkness. This element is contained 
 in matter ; matter is darkness ; matter is evil and 
 the enemy of the soul ; the body must be fortified 
 against it, must be spiritualised by discipline, by 
 mortification and ascetic torments. But the reaction 
 from such restraints to corruption and debauchery 
 has been ever found to be inevitable. Such was the 
 observation of Augustine himself, who was for a time 
 ensnared by the pretensions of this heresy ; such was 
 no doubt the personal experience of the many Chris- 
 tian believers who fell under the same delusion. It 
 is worth observing that the best of the Pagan Moral- 
 ists entertained the same distrust of JNIanicheism as 
 the Christian Fathers. 
 
 From JNIanicheism Augustine wandered to the 
 latest of the Pagan philosophies, which bore the title 
 of the New Platonism, This was in fact no other 
 than a desperate attempt of the ancient Hellenism 
 to revive itself by assimilation with the mysticism 
 of India. It made no pretence of representing 
 
S^. Augustine. 77 
 
 Christianity ; on the contrary, it attacked it ; never- 
 theless it did not fail, while attacking, to borrow no 
 little from it. The New Platonism spoke not less 
 fervently than the Gospel of union with God ; but 
 by this union with the Divine it meant absorption 
 into it ; it pointed not to a conscious independent 
 co-existence with the Deity, a life hid with Christ in 
 God, as the Christian might say, but to the annihila- 
 tion of the creature in his contemplation of the 
 Creator, the Supreme All in All. It rejected a future 
 life altogether in any consistent sense of the word. 
 The Pantheism of the Greeks thus manipulated 
 becomes the Nirvana of the Buddhists. It implies 
 inevitably the destruction of all individual responsi- 
 bility or duty. With this system, which has no 
 doubt its seductive side, Augustine did for a moment 
 dally ; but the fibre of his conscience, so to say, was 
 too tough to be long relaxed by it. We may con- 
 ceive that the painful study of it, and the struggle 
 with it, imparted to him both vigour and knowledge. 
 By meditation on the Logos of Philo and Plotinus, 
 an impersonal abstraction of divine Truth and Wis- 
 dom, he raised himself to a higher level of spiritual 
 thought ; he acknowledged the need of a Personal 
 Word, an incarnate representative of the Divine 
 
78 SL Atigusiine, 
 
 nature, God of God, such as he might now remember 
 to have heard of from his mother's lips — the Christ 
 of the Holy Scriptures. Such were the various ideas 
 which met or coursed one another in the depths of 
 his inmost soul during the long period of his anxious 
 speculations. At one time the death of a Christian 
 friend, throughout the whole period the unceasing 
 prayers of his mother, operated towards the final 
 conversion which was still in store for him. 
 
 But while he was still wandering in the mazes 
 of the Alexandrian school of Platonism he continued 
 to devote himself to the rhetorical exercises which he 
 now regarded as the business of his life, and the 
 more so as he became more and more dissatisfied 
 with his spiritual speculations. He resolved to quit 
 his home at Carthage, and throw himself into the 
 larger theatre of Eome. His dream of glory was 
 here suddenly cut short. It required only the ordi- 
 nary accident of a severe illness to teach him sub- 
 mission to the overruling hand of Providence. His 
 desolate mother, whom he had left behind, speedily 
 rejoined him; and, when he had recovered, accom- 
 panied him to a quieter, but still an important, post 
 as a teacher at Milan. There it was tliat he met 
 with St. Ambrose, then at the height of his autho- 
 
S^. Augustine. 79 
 
 rity and influence. Struck with the erudition, the 
 eloquence, the fame of the great preacher, he was 
 constant in hearing, and cultivating acquaintance 
 with him. He felt perhaps for the first time the 
 grandeur of the Divine Scriptures in the homage 
 paid them by a man so eminent, who spake not from 
 the level of his own human heart, but from the van- 
 tage ground of the Word written for him, expound- 
 ing Grod's declared will, line by line, precept upon 
 precept. As he turned himself to the Bible, and 
 studied it more earnestly, he learnt to regard the 
 Bishop as its appointed interpreter, the Church of 
 which he was a bishop as its appointed guardian. 
 
 To Ambrose Monica disclosed her anxiety for her 
 erring and wilful offspring, and entreated him to 
 lend his assistance, and undertake the conversion of 
 so hopeful a scholar. But Ambrose hesitated, it 
 seems, to put himself forward. He judged perhaps 
 that a ripe conversion should be the work of the 
 seeker himself. Nevertheless, he did not send the 
 mother away without words of comfort : ' Be sure,' 
 he whispered, ' that the child of so many prayers 
 will never be a castaway.' Augustine continued 
 long to hearken, to study, and to reflect. His heart 
 was touched, his judgment was perhaps convinced, 
 
8o SL Augttstine. 
 
 while his pride still withheld him from yielding. 
 His tender conscience still presented to him the 
 pride of life in its brightest colours, and asked him 
 importunately : — could he make up his mind, so 
 young and lusty as he was, to abjure and overcome 
 it? His difficulties were still moral rather than 
 intellectual. But a voice within him, which he 
 took for a Divine message, repeated in his ears the 
 stirring cry, ' Take and read, take and read^ and 
 he still constantly studied the Scriptures, till his 
 mind became finally resolved on meeting with the 
 words of the Apostle, ' Not in rioting and drunken- 
 ness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in 
 strife and envying. But put ye on the Lord Jesus 
 Christ, and make not provision for the flesh, to fulfil 
 the lusts thereof.' 'No further would I read,' he 
 says, ' nor needed I, for instantly, this sentence 
 ended, a serene light was shed in my heart, and all 
 darkness of doubt vanished from me.' 
 
 Thus was the holy Augustine brought to Christ. 
 It was not of his own will, but of the grace of God. 
 Often, as he says, had he tried the power of his own 
 will. Many things had he willed to do, and he was 
 able to do them. Many things had he willed not to 
 do, and he found himself able to refrain from them ; 
 
6'/. Augustine, 8i 
 
 but this one thing was not in his power ; he could 
 not will to believe, and believe accordingly ; he 
 could not will to subdue the inherent evil nature, 
 and therewith effect the victory over his instincts. 
 ' More easily,' he says, ' did my body obey the 
 weakest willing of my soul in moving my limbs at 
 its nod, than did my soul obey itself in accomplish- 
 ing this its momentous will by willing only.' It was 
 by grace, he would infer, that he was converted ; by 
 grace he was saved, as manifestly as Saul on his 
 journey to Damascus. I wish you to note these steps 
 in the new believer's spiritual course, and the special 
 means by which he confessed that he was directed, 
 inasmuch as the effects most proper to them will 
 appear presently, when we consider the main lines of 
 his theological teaching. 
 
 But to continue first with the narrative before us. 
 As soon as the call was thus divinely given, ' putting 
 my finger or some other mark,' as he says, ' in the 
 place, I shut the volume, and with a calmed coun- 
 tenance made it known to my friend Alypius. He 
 asked me what I had read : I pointed out to him 
 the passage, and he went on to look even further 
 than I had pointed, and I knew not what was coming. 
 But these were the words that actually followed: 
 
 G 
 
82 S^. Augustine. 
 
 '^ Him that is weak in the faith receive ; " these words 
 he applied directly to himself, and by this admonition 
 was he strengthened ; . . . and so, with no anxious 
 delay, he joined me. Thence we go in to my mother ; 
 we tell her ; we relate in order how it all took place ; 
 she leapt for joy and blessed Thee, God, " who art 
 able to do above all that we ask or think," for she 
 perceived that Thou, Grod, hadst given her more 
 for me than she had been ever wont to beg by her 
 pitiful and most sorrowful groanings.' 
 
 The records of the holy life which followed are 
 slender. Augustine's practical career was henceforth 
 uneventful, though every day of it was given to the 
 good works of preaching and teaching. He first re- 
 tired for a time to prepare himself for baptism, and 
 received his Christian initiation together with the 
 son of his illicit union — Adeodatus, or Grod's gift, as 
 he had wantonly named him — who died however, as 
 did also his friend Alypius, not long after. From 
 Milan and Eome, in which he had already lost his 
 former interest, he now returned to Africa ; but his 
 good mother died, no doubt in the fulness of her joy, 
 before he embarked at Ostia. Arrived in Africa his 
 first wish was to seek solitude, and devote himself 
 wholly to pious meditation, like the converted 
 
SL Aiigiistine. %^ 
 
 Apostle before him, like so many genuine converts to 
 the Faith at that time, and in all time succeeding. 
 Converted to the faith and church of Christ he still 
 felt that the visible Church on earth fell far short of 
 the mark of her high calling, and it was some time 
 before he could be content to overlook her deficien- 
 cies, and accept the duty of living on to amend and 
 purify her. Thus he passed some years at his native 
 place, gradually emerging by the repute of his 
 writings from the obscurity to which he had devoted 
 himself. Making by chance a visit to Hippo, a 
 small city on the coast, the modern Bona, he suf- 
 fered himself to be ordained there to the priesthood 
 by the bishop Valerius, at whose death, which shortly 
 followed, the congregation insisted on choosing him 
 for their chief pastor. Augustine became Bishop of 
 Hippo, and there he resided for the most part to the 
 end of his life, conferring upon the place a notoriety 
 in ecclesiastical history which it would not have 
 obtained otherwise. At Hippo it is supposed that he 
 was buried ; and when the modern Bona fell, some years 
 ago, into the hands of the French, the very spot of 
 his interment was said to be discovered, and it is pro- 
 posed, I am told, to erect a cathedral church upon it.^ 
 > A tomb of Augustine is also shown at Pavia ; the sculptures 
 
 G 2 
 
84 S^. Augustine, 
 
 From the year 395, when he became a Bishop, to 
 his death in 429, Augustine maintained by the merit 
 of his teaching and preaching the most authoritative 
 position throughout the Western Church. His in- 
 fluence has been often characterised as a moral 
 papacy, freely accorded him by Christian believers, 
 wherever at least his writings in the Latin tongue 
 could be appreciated. He took indeed no practical 
 part in the government of the Church beyond the 
 narrow limits of his own diocese in a corner of 
 Christendom ; but by his theological works our 
 indefatigable divine ruled the Church universal. 
 He discussed and defined perhaps every article of the 
 Faith. The questions then principally in debate — 
 the same, we may say, without meaning to be satiri- 
 cal, which have been more or less explicitly in debate 
 ever since — were three, which we may summarise by 
 the names of the Arian, the Donatist, and the Pela- 
 gian. Upon each of these I will now say a few 
 words only, simply to explain the position which our 
 great Doctor took in regard to each of them, and to 
 show how his position was in each case actually based 
 
 with which it is adorned, consisting of more than three hundred 
 figures, is a work of the fourteenth century ; nor, it seems, is any 
 credit due to the tradition that it incloses the Saint's actual 
 remains. See Valery, Voyages en Italic, i. 215. 
 
vSy. Augustine. 85 
 
 upon his own personal experience, upon the expe- 
 rience gained by his own moral and spiritual triab. 
 The theology of Augustine is truly a philosophy of 
 human nature taught by a personal example. 
 
 First, the Arian hypothesis, speaking broadly 
 and passing over its subtler distinctions, implied the 
 entire inferiority of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 
 divine though they were, to the one Supreme Father. 
 The discussion of this famous hypothesis occupies the 
 foreground in the theology of the Nicene period. 
 To this discussion everything else gives way. It 
 results in a sudden, a violent, a world-wide schism, 
 a long but fortunately not a permanent one. The 
 orthodox Church might seem for a time to be utterly 
 overwhelmed by it. Coming at a moment when the 
 conversion, first of the civilised and again of the 
 barbarian Pagans, was hanging in the balance, and 
 sweeping these new allies by millions into its toils, 
 it might seem to human eyes to portend a great 
 semi-Pagan reaction but slightly veiled under Scrip- 
 tural phraseology. For, in fact, the principle of 
 Arianism bordered immediately upon Paganism. 
 It was the acknowledgment of an inferior hierarchy 
 of superhuman beings, directed and overruled by one 
 Supreme Grod. No matter whether the inferior 
 
86 kSV. Augustine. 
 
 divinities were one or two only, or whether they 
 were counted by hundreds and thousands, the prin- 
 ciple was in either case the same, the idea, namely, 
 the Father of All, the Author and Finisher of our 
 being, is to be approached through the ministrations 
 of heroes, demigods, or demons. 
 
 We may easily conceive that a pseudo-Chris- 
 tianity of such a lower type might prove most accept- 
 able to the blind half-reasoning Pagans to whom it 
 was presented by men who undertook to bring over 
 Greeks and Groths to the religious belief of their 
 sovereign lord the Emperor of Constantinople. We 
 may ourselves reverently believe that Providence de- 
 signed to make use of this error for breaking in these 
 stiffnecked people gradually to the discipline of the 
 true faith. But theirs was now a nominal, not a real 
 or genuine Christianity ; and Athanasius with others 
 after him, and last in due season Augustine, were 
 raised up, first to keep alive the protest against it, 
 and finally to overcome and destroy it. It was by 
 Augustine most of all that the Arian heresy was 
 scotched, if not actually killed. The principle it 
 involves has indeed never been extiipated ; it is too 
 natural to the human heart, too truly a form of our 
 ■Datural Paganism, to be ever wholly extinguished ; 
 
kS/. Augustine. ^^ 
 
 but after it had done its work in preparing the com- 
 plete illumination of the unbelieving world, it was 
 suffered by God's providence to fall from the high 
 station it had occupied throughout Christendom in 
 the fourth and fifth centuries. 
 
 Now Augustine himself, as we have seen, had 
 escaped out of the darkness of Paganism into the 
 light of a genuine Christian faith. He had passed 
 through the forms of Pagan misbelief most congenial 
 to the Arian theory of Christiauity. He had found 
 by his own experience how scientifically untenable 
 were the notions of the Gnostics and Manicheans, 
 with their arbitrary hypotheses of successive incarna- 
 tions of Divinity, of successive seons, an endless and 
 objectless series of divine beings, all subordinate to 
 the one chief God, of whom they are mere represen- 
 tatives and shadows. The principle of Arianism was 
 after all identical with the principle held equally by 
 the Pagan, the Gnostic, and the Manichee. Augus- 
 tine's acuteness discovered the same root of error at 
 the bottom of all these forms of misbelief. And so 
 it was, as I have said, that he was led by his per- 
 sonal experience of Pagan blindness to trace the 
 shades of Christian heresy which still, after the fall 
 of Paganism, confronted him in the churches of his 
 
SS S^. Augustine. 
 
 own diocese and elsewhere throughout Christendom. 
 This then is why our great Doctor wrote his palmary 
 treatise, ' De Trinitate.' 
 
 Again, Augustine found himself at the outset of 
 his episcopacy in controversy with the sect of the 
 Donatists, who may be not unfitly regarded as the 
 Puritans of the early Church. They represented the 
 broad principle which has always prevailed more or 
 less among believers, which had been maintained in 
 the third century by the Montanists, and again by 
 the Novatianists, that the true Church of Christ is 
 the assembly of really pious believers only, and 
 admits of no merely nominal membership under 
 conventional conditions of acceptance. Thus neither 
 a nation, nor a province, nor a parish, they would 
 say, can claim in strictness the title of Christian. 
 It is the individual who is Christian, he who is called 
 out of the world of unbelief, not the community, 
 which even in the purest of churches must always 
 comprehend many false or nominal believers, many 
 evildoers and practical unbelievers, as tares among 
 the wheat. But from the time when the profession 
 of belief began to spread, still more since the accept- 
 ance of Christ by the State had favoured the admis- 
 sion into the Church of a multitude of unworthy 
 
S^. AugMstme. 89 
 
 members, the Church, it might be said, had lent itself 
 to a falsehood and a sin, the Church, popularly so- 
 called, had forfeited its claim to be the true body of 
 Christ. The true believer^ the genuine Catholic, was 
 called upon to come out from it, to renounce it with 
 all its works, to set up a true church in his own bosom, 
 and communicate as a fellow-Christian with those 
 only who had made the same discovery of its error 
 as himself, and had made the sacrifice together with 
 him of its pretended blessings. Now in the time 
 of the Diocletian persecution some of the weaker 
 brethren had been induced to surrender their copies 
 of the Scriptures at the demand of the Pagan 
 authorities. Some persons of name and position 
 among the believers, some bishops even in Numidia, 
 had saved their lives by this discreditable weakness. 
 Such men were noted, shunned, and vilified by their 
 braver or perhaps more fortunate brethren, who had 
 escaped without being reduced to make any such 
 unworthy compliances. A great cry was raised against 
 them; vehement demand was made for their excom- 
 munication. The Church in Africa became sorely 
 agitated; but at last it was decided that their 
 contrition should be accepted, and they should there- 
 upon be admitted as before to the privileges of the 
 
90 S^. Augtistine. 
 
 Christian professioD. Still a minority at least of 
 rigorists, or Puritans, as we might call them, pro- 
 tested loudly against this indulgence. The Dona- 
 tists, so called from their leader, declared that the 
 Church had denied its Lord, and compromised its 
 orthodoxy ; and they proceeded, upon this foundation 
 alone, to constitute a new Church which, ever mind- 
 ful of its point of starting, should require personal 
 holiness as the one specific condition of church- 
 membership. So firmly indeed was the principle 
 of Episcopacy established that no occasion was taken 
 for renouncing or modifying this primitive insti- 
 tution. Puritans though they were, the Donatists 
 were not Presbyterians. Our modern Puritans, it 
 will be remembered, were not at first voluntarily 
 anti-prelatical. These separatists set up a rival epis- 
 copal church in Africa ; and at the end of the century, 
 when Augustine came in contact with them, they are 
 said to have numbeied in their corner of the Empire 
 as many as three hundred prelates. 
 
 Of the theological aspects of the question between 
 the combatants I will only say that the Donatists 
 were plainly extravagant in -demanding absolute 
 holiness of every professing member of the visible 
 Church under pain of exclusion from its communion. 
 
SL Augtistine. 91 
 
 Of such a qualification human eyes can be but im- 
 perfect judges. Yet we cannot say that they erred 
 in making the condition of admission a serious 
 reality. The Church visible upon earth must be, no 
 doubt, a community, if not of actual saints, at least 
 of such as are bent upon attaining to sanctification. 
 From the first the Church has admitted daily not 
 such as were, but ' such as should he saved,' or were 
 engaged in the process of working out their salvation. 
 She has a right to exact of her members the proof 
 of their actual belief and their sincere devotion. 
 The Donatists carried this right beyond all sober 
 reason. But, on the other hand, Augustine seems to 
 have no less deceived himself when he maintained 
 that the true mark of the Church is simply the 
 visibility of its exterior constitution, the form, that 
 is, rather than the essence of godliness. The Dona- 
 tists looked, in short, too exclusively to the sub- 
 jective character of a true saving faith. With their 
 narrow, their provincial views, so to call them, they 
 thought perhaps that this saving faith was strictly 
 confined to the members of their own special sect, 
 whom they had so carefully sifted from the general 
 mass. Augustine, on the other hand, regarded a saving 
 faith objectively, as the prerogative of all those who 
 
92 S^. Augustine. 
 
 were formally included in the historical church which 
 traced its credentials from the Apostles. Churchmen 
 he considered as ' a peculiar people,' just as strictly 
 as the Jewish people before them ; not meaning of 
 course that all should be saved who dwelt within the 
 Church's pale, but that none should be saved who 
 strayed beyond it. 'No one,' he said, 'can have 
 Christ for his head, who is not comprehended in the 
 body of Christ.' Now this body, he would continue, 
 is the orthodox Church of Christ. To pretend that 
 the existence of this Church depends on the holiness, 
 greater or less, of its individual members is a great 
 error ; we must fix our eyes solely on the divine side of 
 the institution itself. The Church is Grod's own founda- 
 tion ; it is built upon the rock of His immutable 
 and supreme authority ; to make it depend on the 
 characters of men would be to place it on a moving 
 sand. Accordingly, while the Donatists placed holi- 
 ness before catholicity, Augustine, on his part, 
 established an inverse relation between the two 
 attributes.^ We may conclude that the contest 
 between our great Teacher and the Donatists had, in 
 fact, two sides, each of which presented one aspect 
 
 * I would refer the reader more particularly to M. Pressensfe's 
 Essay in the Seances Historiques a Geneve, p. 292. 
 
S^. Augustine. 93 
 
 of the Truth. Augustine put forth his consummate 
 ability in the combat, and seems to have discomfited 
 his adversary at the time in the forum of the public 
 conscience ; but the principle in debate has been 
 agitated with little cessation ever since, and assuredly 
 it never can be settled except by admitting that 
 God, and Grod only, knows who are His own for 
 saltation or reprobation, and that the limits of the 
 objective and the subjective in spiritual life can 
 never be defined by a mere human judgment. 
 
 The Donatist sect, as I have said, was Epis- 
 copalian, not Presbyterian. To use our modern 
 phraseology, it was Evangelical rather than Puritan. 
 But the offence it gave to the Ecclesiastical or High 
 Church party was enhanced by its allying itself with 
 the Circumcellions, the Independents or Eadicals of 
 the age; in which we may note a further concidence 
 with some features in modern church-history. These 
 Circumcellions had, no doubt, their own social griev- 
 ances ; perhaps they had some spiritual grievances 
 also, but they carried their resistance to law and 
 order, both secular and ecclesiastical, beyond all 
 endurable limits. They made themselves truly the 
 pests of society ; they broke out here and there into 
 open violence. To suppress them even by force 
 
94 ^^' Augustine, 
 
 became a political necessity, and the Donatists 
 naturally suffered in general estimation from their 
 connection with them. When the Church, at the 
 instigation of Augustine, denounced the Donatists as 
 heretics, and called in the secular power to impose 
 conformity upon them, it was no more than might 
 have been expected from the known infirmity of 
 human nature. But alas ! an act of conformity is 
 too closely allied to an act of persecution. Augustine, 
 alas! was the first persecutor! The name and au- 
 thority of the Saint has sanctioned the first fatal 
 perversion of the text, ' Compel them to come in,' 
 'which has been the root and ground of all Christian 
 persecution from that time to the present. 
 
 I cannot excuse, and I confess I have not the 
 heart to extenuate this grievous error. All I can do, 
 in behalf of our pious Teacher, is to point out, by 
 reference to what has been said of his early life, the 
 personal experience which seems to have imbued him 
 with such horror of heretical pravity. When, as a late- 
 converted Christian, he looked back to the course of 
 his varied struggles, to the aspirations after spi- 
 ritual truth which had so long entranced him, — ever 
 baffled and disappointed, yet ever springing up again 
 with new hopes and flatteries, — when he remembered 
 
S^. Augush7ie. 95 
 
 how he had at first been merely careless and regard- 
 less of the spiritual life, listening perhaps for a 
 moment to his mother's prayer, and again letting it 
 drop unheeded from his memory, attending perhaps 
 with greater interest to some utterance of worldly 
 wisdom from his father, and wonderiog for a moment 
 how the two might be reconciled ; how he turned 
 from these to the more attractive lessons of the 
 Pagan Sophists, which seemed to promise such great 
 things, and were at last found to establish so little ; 
 how again, advancing further, he betook himself to 
 the systematic teaching of the philosophical schools, 
 and traversed one after another the fields of thought 
 which the Platonists, the Academics, the Alex- 
 andrians successively opened to him ; how, still 
 dissatisfied, still eager, and more than ever anxious 
 to come to the knowledge of the truth, which still 
 eluded his pursuit, he sought among the Grnostics 
 that combination of divine Kevelation with human 
 guess-work which is the root of Heresy, and still 
 found himself no nearer to Grod, or to the Word of 
 God, by which only He can be approached ; when 
 he remembered, I say, how he had gone through all 
 this course of fruitless enquiry, in which success 
 seemed evQr more distant, yet ever more vital to 
 
96 St Augustine. 
 
 him; then he may well have muttered to himself, 
 What have I been doing all this time? Row 
 have I been seeking Truth? What standard of 
 Truth, what test of Truth have I set up for myself ? 
 Surely, I have been wrong, hopelessly wrong, from 
 the beginning. I have been making myself, my 
 own feelings, my own judgment, the measure of 
 Truth, — the human of the Divine — the finite of the 
 Infinite — myself of Grod ! And when, by Grod's favour, 
 he got the opportunity of consulting the experienced 
 Ambrose upon his spiritual troubles, may not the 
 Christian monitor have simply replied to him : True, 
 you have been making yourself judge of matters 
 quite beyond your means of judgment : you have 
 been choosing for yourself, choosing your own means, 
 your own road, your own oracles. This is Heresy ; 
 this is the source of error against which the holy 
 Apostles have warned you ; this is that perversion 
 of the human reason against which the Holy Scrip- 
 tures are set up as a beacon of light and safety ? 
 Thus warned, the scales would seem to drop from his 
 eyes. The sermons of Ambrose himself, the comments 
 of the pious men who flocked around him, the teach- 
 ing of the Christian Church at Milan, the discipline 
 of the catechumens with whom he was now ranging 
 
S^. Atigustine. 97 
 
 himself, would all tend to give him clearer and 
 deeper views of the errors whereby he had been 
 deluded ; he would quickly learn to connect in his 
 own mind every evil practice among the false 
 teachers with the heretical pravity thus fastened 
 upon them ; he would come to look with deep, 
 perhaps with excessive jealousy upon every departure 
 from the strict doctrine and still stricter discipline 
 of the Church, and to deem it the Christian's first 
 duty to exert whatever authority he possessed in the 
 extirpation — aye, even the forcible extirpation of 
 error. But the Pagan was surely wiser than St. 
 Augustine, who warned us long before, ' Deorum in- 
 jurise Dis curse' (the gods will look to their own 
 honour) ; or, as I would rather say in the words of 
 Scripture itself, 'Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord; 
 I will repay.' The Christian Origen, the Christian 
 TertuUian, had both already decisively declared that 
 ' Religion cannot constrain Religion.' 
 
 I have well-nigh exhausted the time which can 
 be allotted me, and you can imagine how inexhaust- 
 ible is the subject on which I have ventured to make 
 these almost desultory observations. But there is 
 one other point which, before concluding, I would 
 not leave altogether unnoticed. An essay or lecture 
 
98 S^. Augustine. 
 
 on the character and influence of the great Augustine, 
 
 without reference to his contest with Pelagius, and 
 
 the question of Grace and Freewill with which his 
 
 name is most popularly connected, would be even 
 
 too glaringly deficient. Yet, what can I say upon it 
 
 within the compass of two or three pages? What 
 
 light could I throw upon it, so slight as is my own 
 
 acquaintance with the details of that wide and 
 
 weighty controversy, so inadequate as is my ability 
 
 to thi'ead the intricate reasonings it involves ? The 
 
 utterances of the holy Doctor upon these abstruse 
 
 subjects are scattered throughout his works, and refer 
 
 to various periods of his life, and no doubt to different 
 
 stages of opinion in his own mind. I do not suppose 
 
 that any one considers the many attempts which have 
 
 been made to harmonize them as really successful. 
 
 It will be generally allowed that in refuting the 
 
 Manichees, who maintained the entire corruption of 
 
 human nature, Augustine admitted the freedom of the 
 
 Will, so far at least as to long for the Good, to aim 
 
 at it, if not actually to attain to it ; while, on the 
 
 other hand, in controversy with the Pelagians, he 
 
 would seem to assert that the unregenerate man, of his 
 
 own power, can neither do nor will any good thing.' 
 
 ' Hagenbach {Hist, of DoctHnes, vol. i, § 112) summarises 
 the controversy on the point of Liberty and Grace : — 
 
S^. Augustine.. 99 
 
 Nevertheless, theologians have allowed that whatever 
 difference may be traced in his views on this point 
 under different circumstances, it is as the asserter 
 of Divine Grrace, of Predestination, of Election by 
 the will of God only, that Augustine is most 
 eminently distinguished. This is the judgment 
 which, however modified, explained, and perhaps 
 explained away, has been the foundation of the 
 Church's teaching in all after ages, to which she has 
 been again and again recalled by many eminent 
 masters when she seemed to have obscured or for- 
 gotten it. Now, I have tried to show, in some special 
 instances, how our Doctor's views were plainly moulded 
 by the character of his own spiritual experiences. I 
 would counsel you to look to similar causes and effects 
 in the case before us. The question of Grace and 
 
 ' Pelagius admitted that man in his moral efforts stands in 
 need of the Divine aid, and therefore spoke of the grace of God 
 as assisting the imperfections of man by a variety of means. 
 He supposed, however, that this grace of God is something 
 external, and added to the efforts put forth by the freewill of 
 man ; it must therefore be discovered by virtuous inclinations. 
 Augustine, on the other hand, looked upon it as the creative 
 principle of life, which produces out of itself the liberty of the 
 will which is entirely lost in the natural man. . . . the regenerate 
 man alone can will the good .... operari Deum in cordibus 
 hominum non solum veras revelationes sed bonas etiam volun- 
 tates.' 
 
 H 2 
 
lOO SL Atigtistine. 
 
 Freewill has been agitated among men from the first. 
 In spite of anything Augustine may have written, or 
 the hundreds of disputants since Augustine, this same 
 question is still presented to every one of us, to each 
 in his generation, and will surely never approach 
 more nearly to a definite settlement than at the first. 
 And why ? Because it is not a question of logical or 
 mathematical truth, which is subject to abstract and 
 immutable laws, but refers to the diverse constitu- 
 tion and temperaments of men, which can never be 
 expected to coincide. It is a mystery, and a mystery 
 has ever two sides. Augustine took the side of Grrace, 
 and threw himself into the controversy — which in 
 his day had assumed a very practical shape, when 
 Pelagius was threatening to divide the Church on a 
 question which seemed to involve the doctrine of 
 Kedemption itself — threw himself into it with all his 
 energy, and I would add, with much of his fanatic 
 extravagance. And why did he take this view? 
 Surely, it was the overpowering sense of his own per- 
 sonal experience that impelled him to it. Reflection 
 upon the chequered course of his own spiritual career 
 would impress him with a sense of the inability of 
 the human will to acquire an effectual knowledge of 
 Divine Truth. In the full enjoyment of his intel- 
 
S^. Augustine. loi 
 
 lectual freedom, he had ran through all the known 
 systems of moral discipline; he was conscious how 
 truly he had wished to attain to the highest prin- 
 ciples of religion, how earnest had been his efforts. 
 He had become aware of the hindrance imposed on 
 his aspirations by the world and the flesh; he had 
 confessed and repented of sin ; nevertheless, neither 
 Paganism, nor philosophy, nor any self-devised notions 
 of Eevelation itself, had availed to satisfy him that 
 he had at last received a call from Grod, and had 
 become actually converted to the Faith as it is in 
 Christ Jesus. Then it was that the conviction was 
 forced upon him that the call must be the gift, the 
 free gift of Grod Himself ; that the human will, the 
 mere natural desire, however intense, has no power 
 of itself to lead a man to his Redeemer ; and that 
 any system of religion which assumes man's possess- 
 ing such a power must stand self-condemned under 
 a true interpretation of the Divine Word. But, 
 inasmuch as he knew only too well how opposed this 
 conviction was to the popular notions of the time, 
 and how grievously he had been himself deluded by 
 them, he resolved to take his stand firmly upon this 
 cardinal Truth, to follow it out to any logical ex- 
 treme in the distance, to admit of no compromise of 
 
I02 SL Augtcstine. 
 
 the doctrine of Grace, as the only ordained means 
 of salvation. Nor was it possible for him, perhaps, 
 having once laid down this principle, to shrink from 
 dogmatizing on its direct corollary, the doctrine of 
 divine Predestination. If a man's own freewill can- 
 not secure divine Grrace for him, it is because Grrace 
 is given by God to those whom He has chosen and 
 appointed for it, not to whosoever himself desires it. 
 Grace, Predestination, Election, are all closely linked 
 together ; so combined they form the most prominent 
 feature in St. Paul's inspired teaching. But St. Paul's 
 general doctrine is again modified by the sense which 
 all Scripture conveys to us of our personal responsi- 
 bility. It is clear that both must co-exist, diversity 
 in unity, harmonized only in the Divine omniscience ; 
 predestination cannot destroy responsibility, responsi- 
 bility must not put out of sight predestination. We 
 have before us, as I said, a mystery which has two 
 sides ; imperfect as we are, we must accept it as 
 it stands revealed to us. But if Augustine, like so 
 many teachers after him, leant too much to the one 
 side, as at least in his controversy with Pelagius will 
 be generally conceded, we may thus trace his error 
 to a sentiment which was really and deeply religious. 
 For he felt the obligation of giving all the glory to 
 
S^. AugMstine. 103 
 
 Grod for the immense blessing he had himself re- 
 ceived ; he felt the duty of glorifying GTod, especially 
 in a generation so much addicted to the glorification 
 of human nature. He burned with just indignation 
 at the pride of Paganism and philosophy, which, 
 though deprived of secular power, still contended 
 intellectually for the mastery with the advancing 
 convictions of Christian faith. Again and again have 
 similar conditions arisen in human society at many 
 later periods ; and again has the preaching of Grrace, 
 Election, and Predestination assumed the same pro- 
 minence in Christian teaching as in the days of St. 
 Paul and of Augustine. Such was the preaching of a 
 Luther, a Knox, and a Calvin, which struck down the 
 Paganism of the corrupted Church in the sixteenth 
 century throughout so large a part of Christendom : 
 such was the preaching which uttered so bold a pro- 
 test from the lips of Nicole, of Arnauld, of Pascal, 
 against the corrupt Church of France under the pre- 
 vailing influence of the Jesuits : such was the preach- 
 ing by which Whitefield and the so-called Calvinists 
 among ourselves, such as Newton and Cecil, Eomaine 
 and Toplady, awakened the Church of England from 
 its philosophical pride or lethargy in the century 
 before our own. If such preaching is not advanced 
 
I04 S^. Augustine. 
 
 so vehemently in our churches and chapels at the 
 present day as at earlier epochs, we may, I trust, 
 take it as a sign that whatever our religious defects 
 may be, there is less of the mere pride of intellect 
 among professing Christians, a more effectual sense 
 of our spiritual weakness, a better inclination to yield 
 ourselves to the familiar teaching of those who are set 
 over us ; so that, comparing line with line and pre- 
 cept with precept, we may free ourselves from all one- 
 sided exaggeration, and attain with submission and 
 circumspection unto the true proportion of the Faith.* 
 
 1 M. de Pressense sums up the moral question involved in 
 the controversy between Pelagius and Augustine with force, and 
 I think with sound judgment, from the point of view both of 
 religion and history: — 
 
 * On nous objectera, peut-etre, qu'au point de vue moral 
 I'angustinisme a des consequences bien graves et qu'il porta 
 atteinte ^ la responsabilite de la creature libre. Nous en con- 
 venons; mais nous affirmons que le sentiment qui a inspire 
 I'augustinisme, meme dans ses plus fatales erreurs, 6tait pro- 
 fondement religieux : ce sentiment c'etait le besoin ardent de 
 donner toute gloire ^ Dieu, de prosterner, de courber devant 
 lui dans la poudre la creature coupable qui avait ose lui disputer 
 sa gloire ; c'etait com me une revanche passionnee de I'humilite 
 chr^tienne contre I'orgueil humain. Qu'on n'oublie pas les 
 circonstances dans lesquelles I'augustinisme s'est produit au 
 quatri^me si^cle, comme aussi au seizi^me dans la reformation 
 et au dix-septi^me dans le jansenisme ; ^ ces trois epoques une 
 tentative audacieuse avait ete faite de relever le merite humain 
 au-deasus de la grace. Les vrais Chretiens ne peuvent accepter 
 
St Augustine. \o^ 
 
 Slight as this sketch of Augustine's teaching has 
 been, it has not left me room for any reference to the 
 work which was perhaps, in his day, the most impor- 
 tant of all — his treatise on the ' City of God.' Cer- 
 tainly, I have not forgotten it ; but its interest is of 
 an historical rather than a theological character, and 
 it is to the dogmatic views of the great Doctor that 
 the course of my observations on his life have led me 
 in the present lecture. When I come, in another 
 address, to speak of the historical foundation of the 
 Papal pretensions, with Pope Leo the Great for my 
 central figure, I shall have occasion to refer particu- 
 larly to the ecclesiastical position asserted by this 
 famous manifesto. 
 
 froidement une telle perversion. ... lis peuvent se tromper 
 dans cette voie en exagerant leur reaction. . . . N'importe ; ils 
 accomplissent un acte essentiellement moral et religieux, tandis 
 que leurs adversaires, qui peuvent avoir raison dans quelques- 
 unes de leurs objections, obeissent neanmoins k une inspiration 
 mondaine et subversaire de la vraie religion, car celle-ci implique 
 la dependance absolue de I'lionune vis-^-vis de Dieu. L'histoire 
 d'ailleurs apporte son puissant temoignage k I'augustinisme. 
 Partout ou il a predomine le niveau de la vie religieuse et 
 morale s'est eleve ; partout ou le pelagianisme a triomphe ce 
 niveau s'est abaisse. . . . Ainsi done repetons encore qu'au 
 point de vue de la morale, comme k celui du dogme, s'il faut 
 choisir entre I'augustinisme et le pelagianisme, plutot cent fois 
 le premier que le second.' — Seancea historiques, p. 324. 
 
LECTUKE III. 
 
 ST. LEO THE GREAT, AND THE EISE OF THE 
 PAPACY. 
 
 The great Saint Augustine, of whose life and teach- 
 ing I gave you a sketch in my last lecture, was still 
 Bishop of Hippo at the period of the secular fall of 
 Eome, early in the fifth century. The sack of the 
 imperial city by the Goths led directly to the firmer 
 establishment of the Christian Church in the West, 
 and to the exaltation of the Roman see, and so, 
 under the vigorous rule of the illustrious pontiff 
 Leo, to the rise of the Papal supremacy. The sack 
 of Rome has thus given a colour to the whole subse- 
 quent history of Europe, and I think we are justified 
 in regarding that event as the legitimate commence- 
 ment of modern society. As it has been tersely 
 expressed by a great French poet — 
 
 Un grand destin commence, un grand destin s'acheve. 
 Unless all history is to be written from the creation 
 of the world, the historian must mark for himself 
 
SL Leo the Great. 107 
 
 some definite epochs, and appropriate points both of 
 starting and of pausing. 
 
 The Western empire had been defended against 
 the barbarians under Alaric by the valour of Stilicho, 
 and the invaders, though they had secured for them- 
 selves the passage of the Alps, could penetrate no 
 farther southward. The puny emperor Honorius 
 had abandoned Kome ; but he had planted his throne 
 in advance of the imperial city at Eavenna, a place 
 at that time especially strong in itself, and con- 
 venient for government. Confident in the victories 
 his able general had now achieved, he allowed himself 
 to give way to some miserable personal jealousy, and 
 contrived the assassination of his protector. On 
 Stilicho's death the Groths stirred again. The Em- 
 peror, a feeble devotee, had had the temerity to 
 exclude all Pagans from his military service. He 
 was forced to remove the prohibition in all haste ; 
 but it was now too late. Alaric was advancing. No 
 Koman commanders dared to confront him ; but 
 Honorius was satisfied when he saw the invader leave 
 Ravenna on his flank, and throw himself upon the 
 direct road to Rome. The citizens, thus deserted, 
 were utterly dismayed. The ramparts of Aurelian 
 had indeed been recently repaired, but the de- 
 
io8 S^. Leo the Great. 
 
 scendants of Mars and Eomulus had been forbidden 
 to bear arms for two hundred years previously, and 
 there were no disciplined legions at hand to take 
 their place on the ramparts. 
 
 A curious incident followed. Certain Etruscans, 
 it is said, fleeing before the advancing barbarians, 
 entered the city. They spoke with fond regret of 
 the long-neglected usages of their countrymen, and 
 protested that, by resorting to their ancient rites, 
 they had already saved one of their towns from 
 falling into the enemy's hands. They had evoked 
 lightning from heaven, and thrown the invading 
 hosts into confusion. Pompeianus, prefect of the 
 city, lent a facile ear to this hopeful story, and 
 deigned to refer to the pontifical books, which, it 
 seems, were still accessible, to direct him. From 
 these he turned to the Eoman bishop Innocent, who 
 had succeeded to the great Ambrose of Milan in 
 respect and authority among the believers. The 
 bishop hesitated ; he would not, indeed, refuse to 
 allow the Etruscans to take their own measures, but 
 they must do so on their own responsibility ; they 
 must do so privately. They replied that their rites 
 must be performed at a public ceremonial; the 
 people must take part in them ; the senate must 
 
S^. Leo the Great. 109 
 
 mount the Capitol in solemn pomp, and perform the 
 sacrifices ordained of old ; otherwise, they would be 
 ineffectual. We hear no further how Innocent con- 
 ducted himself. The Pagan historian Zosimus de- 
 clares that the senators themselves shrank from this 
 bold assertion of Pagan belief, how much soever many 
 of them might at heart incline to it ; while a Christian 
 authority does not scruple to affirm that they actually 
 assisted at the impious rites, which proved, of course, 
 utterly unavailing. Both the one party and the 
 other was evidently concerned to justify, from its 
 own point of view, the doom which fell on the 
 devoted city; the Pagan hinting that it was pro- 
 voked by the cowardice of the Pagans, the Christian 
 that it was a righteous punishment for the want ot 
 faith in the believers ; but which of them gave the 
 true account, it seems impossible to determine. The 
 story in either case is interesting to us, as showing 
 how undecided were the convictions both of Christians 
 and Pagans during the mortal crisis of the ancient 
 superstitions, and how nearly, under a common cala- 
 mity, they sympathised one with the other. Mean- 
 while, Alaric drew nearer. No aid could now come 
 from Eavenna, and he straitened the supplies of 
 the city, while he calmly awaited its surrender. 
 
no St. Leo the Great. 
 
 A large and unprepared population was soon reduced 
 to extremity. The Christians exercised their charity 
 to the utmost, but their means were presently ex- 
 hausted. At last the citizens sued for mercy, and 
 offered ransom. Alaric's demands seemed exor- 
 bitant. They threatened him with the despair of 
 their enormous multitudes. ' The thicker the 
 hay,' he exclaimed derisively, ' the easier to mow 
 it!' When he named his lowest terms, they were 
 struck with consternation. ' What, then, will you 
 leave us ? ' they muttered. ' Your lives,' was his 
 stern reply. 
 
 It is curious to note the price at which the great 
 city was valued. The demands of the captor, as 
 Zosimus particularly informs us, were 5,000 pounds 
 of gold, 30,000 of silver, 4,000 silken robes, 3,000 
 pieces of scarlet cloth, 3,000 pounds of pepper. We 
 may take the amount of gold and silver at 350,000^. 
 of our money. The silk and the spice were no doubt 
 very valuable. I do not know whether their price can 
 be calculated more closely. But the whole sum, if 
 fairly represented by half a million sterling, may 
 moderate our ideas of the wealth and population of 
 Rome at this period of its decline.^ The ransom of 
 ' The value assigned to the items enumerated must be taken 
 
S^. Leo the Great. 1 1 1 
 
 Paris, exacted by the Germans in 1871 — five milliards 
 of francs, or 200 millions sterling — would seem to 
 have been four hundred times greater. Modern 
 Paris contains, no doubt, thrice the numbers of 
 Eome at the period before us, and I dare say ten 
 times its wealth. Yet the greed of the Goths, bar- 
 barians as they were, seems trifling compared with 
 that of their more civilised descendants in our own 
 considerate days. But Alaric and his Goths were 
 satisfied, and kept faith with the conquered people, 
 who liquidated the charge by spoiling the temples 
 and images of the ancient divinities. Among these 
 images was one, says the Pagan historian, of Courage 
 or Virtue, ' as the Eomans call her ' : when this 
 divinity was cast into the melting-pot, disappeared 
 from Rome all that remained of her honour or 
 valour. ' The men,' he adds, ' who were adepts in 
 divine lore announced but too truly the ruin which 
 should follow.' 
 
 Ruin was indeed impending, but the fall was yet 
 
 on a wide conjecture ; but I believe we may estimate the pound 
 of gold at about £50 in our money, and the pound of silver at 
 l-15th the value of gold. Accordingly, 5,000 lbs. of gold would 
 amoimt to £250,000, 30,000 lbs. of silver ( = 2,000 lbs. of gold) to 
 £100,000. 
 
112 St. Leo the Great. 
 
 for a moment deferred. Thereupon the weak and va- 
 cillating Emperor sought to make terms with the old 
 idolatry he had hitherto proscribed. But adversity 
 did not teach him to deal loyally with his triumphant 
 enemy. Alaric felt himself aggrieved, and advanced 
 again upon Rome. He passed round the walls, and 
 seized upon the port of Ostia. The supplies of the 
 city were at once cut off. She knew too well what 
 must be her fate, and promptly opened her gates. 
 The Groth had now changed his policy, and pro- 
 claimed a rival Emperor. His minion Attains had 
 been hitherto a Pagan : he now accepted Arian 
 baptism among his new allies, who were mostly 
 attached to the Arian profession ; but at the same 
 time he openly favoured the Pagan faction in the 
 city, as still offering him the strongest support. So 
 hard did the old religion die, even in these its 
 expiring throes! But no sooner had Alaric with- 
 drawn, than the throne of his feeble nominee was 
 shaken. The people rose and drove away the pre- 
 tender. Alaric now gave Attains to understand that 
 he must not affect to reign where he could not 
 govern ; but the conqueror undertook to avenge the 
 insult thus offered to himself, and appeared a third 
 time before the devoted walls. An early prophecy 
 
67. Leo the Great, 113 
 
 had assured him that he should enter Rome : a 
 voice still constantly echoed in his ears, crying 
 out and saying, ' On, and destroy the city ! ' 
 
 The Eomans closed their barriers, and pretended 
 to defend them ; but the Salarian gate was opened 
 by treachery, and the Groths descended into the city 
 on the 24th day of August 410. At the same point, 
 800 years before, the Grauls had entered Rome, bring- 
 ing fire and sword. But Alaric was no Brennus ; the 
 Groths, though they had some desperate treacheries 
 to avenge, were not bent on slaughter or destruction. 
 The barbarians were content with some days of 
 pillage, and doubtless the sack of the world's capital 
 was not accomplished without violence and cruelty. 
 Doubtless, men were slain in the defence of their 
 homes or their families. Women were dishonoured. 
 Slaves were set free, with such consequences as we 
 may imagine. Concealed treasures were drawn forth 
 by threats and tortures. Many houses, some temples, 
 were given to the flames ; but the Christians, for their 
 part, ascribed such catastrophes generally to light- 
 ning, and pointed to the Divine judgment, as indi- 
 cated thereby, which had at last fallen upon the 
 Babylon of Revelation. Both Augustine and Jerome, 
 who describe the event in excited language, seem 
 
 I 
 
114 St. Leo the Great. 
 
 willing to extenuate the crimes of the conquerors, 
 partly with a view to insinuating that the fall of 
 Eome was Grod's work, not man's; partly to show 
 that the Groths were softened, at least, even by the 
 imperfect form of Gospel truth they had adopted. 
 These apologists do not pretend indeed that the 
 believers had escaped, as from Jerusalem of old, 
 unscathed in the universal disaster ; but they declared 
 that the instrument of Divine vengeance, himself a 
 believer though a heretic, had interfered stoutly for 
 their protection. Assuredly Alaric respected the 
 churches, and within their sacred walls the Christians 
 found shelter and safety. The right of asylum was 
 extended even to the Pagans who sought refuge at 
 the altars of the Eedeemer of mankind. Among 
 the edifices which succumbed to the flames the 
 churches of St. Peter and St. Paul escaped unin- 
 jured. Even the treasures of the sanctuary, with 
 the furniture of plate and jewels, were preserved 
 intact. On one occasion a furious plunderer was 
 overawed by the sanctity of a helpless virgin, who 
 placed the vessels she guarded under the protection 
 of the Apostles. Another, who offered her life to 
 preserve her honour, was led by the remorseful 
 barbarian to the door of the church, and a gift of 
 
St Leo the Great. 115 
 
 gold forced upon her. Marcella, the aged friend of 
 Jerome, was beaten to extort the treasures she was 
 reputed to possess, but which she had actually ex- 
 pended in charity ; and she too softened the heart of 
 the oppressor, and was brought by his kindly hand 
 to the common asylum, the church dedicated to the 
 holy Paul. 
 
 It was well, perhaps, that Innocent the bishop 
 was absent from the city at this crisis. He had 
 betaken himself to Ravenna to implore assistance. 
 His spiritual office gave him the first place in the 
 confidence of his fellow-citizens. His courage or his 
 sense of duty might have impelled him, had he been 
 present, to protract a hopeless resistance. 
 
 The barbarian was soon satisfied with his easy 
 triumph. He quitted Rome within twelve days; 
 nor did he now trouble himself to impose any ruler 
 or form of government upon its people. His fol- 
 lowers were impatient for plunder elsewhere. Mean- 
 while, great numbers of all classes and of every per- 
 suasion fled beyond sea. Many Christians betook 
 themselves to the opposite shores of Africa, where 
 they were hospitably entertained by the flourishing 
 communities of their fellow-believers. But com- 
 plaint was made that they brought with them an 
 I 2 
 
1 1 6 St. Leo the Great. 
 
 inveterate spirit of levity and worldliness ; and the 
 fugitives from the sack of Eome caused grave scandal 
 in the bosom of a purer and simpler society. Alaric 
 was soon cut oif by sickness in Southern Italy, so often 
 fatal to conquerors from beyond the Alps. After his 
 death the great Gothic invasion ebbed backwards, 
 and the Romans, in diminished numbers and abashed 
 in spirit, returned to their homes. The Pagans were 
 utterly cowed. They allowed their temples, the 
 remnant of those which had not yet been actually 
 closed, to remain empty or to fall into the hands of 
 their opponents. The decrees, long issued but only 
 partially enforced against them, acquired now a 
 living authority. The vital powers of the ancient 
 creeds seemed to collapse with the loss of property 
 and position. The Christian priesthood grew rich on 
 the resources of the Pagan endowments, and still 
 more, perhaps, from the perennial offerings of the 
 devout and charitable. The world in general bowed 
 to their jubilant assertion, that the fall of Rome was 
 the judgment of God upon the unbelieving world, 
 and beheld in the greatest of secular calamities an 
 overwhelming proof of the Gospel revelation. 
 
 The conquest of the city by Alaric in the year 
 410 may be emphatically designated as the ' Fall of 
 
SL Leo the Great. 1 1 7 
 
 Eome,' although the ancient capital of civil society 
 still survived, to be stormed and sacked twice again 
 in the course of the sixty years that followed ; nor 
 was her secular ascendancy as the mistress of nations 
 finally overthrown till the Western empire was 
 dissolved by Odoacer in the year 476. It was the 
 moral or religious lesson conveyed by the conquest of 
 Alaric that really constituted the fall of Eome, for 
 this conquest destroyed once for all the idea upon 
 which the power of the ancient city had been long 
 sustained. The pervading idea of the ancient world 
 had been that Eome, the capital of the Empire, the 
 metropolis of all secular culture, the focus of all 
 secular energy, was the City of Man ; the ultimate 
 product of the ages of human life and progress. She 
 was the heir of Thebes and Babylon, of Phoenicia 
 and Etruria, of Carthage and Athens — ' Time's 
 greatest offspring was her last ' — last and fairest ; 
 rerum pulcherrima Eoma. Surely the new Eome, 
 the mushroom city of Constantine, was a mere vul- 
 gar imitation, made to order, of this the true crown 
 and glory of human existence. And so it was that 
 the proud patriot Cicero had long before declared : 
 ' A city, or commonwealth, should be so constituted 
 as to last for ever. There is no natural dissolution 
 
1 1 8 SL Leo the Great. 
 
 of a city as of a man, for whom death is always a 
 necessity, sometimes a benefit. But when a city is 
 overthrown, is extinguished, is annihilated, it is like 
 as if (to compare small things with great) the whole 
 world should be dissolved and perish.' 
 
 This was a sentiment which even the Christians 
 had not failed to imbibe and appropriate. The 
 Apologists of an earlier generation had accepted the 
 imperial domination of the Grreat City as a principle 
 of Divine government. The rule of Caesar was to 
 them a law of Providence. The world, in their 
 view, was Pagan, unbelieving, idolatrous to the core ; 
 it stood in direct opposition to the society of Chris- 
 tians or the Church, to which belonged the promises 
 of the future, but which had no part in the pride 
 and glory of the present life. With this dispensa- 
 tion they were in the main content, nor did they 
 look for any change in it. The ruler of the Pagan 
 world, they deemed, must of necessity be a Pagan. 
 They esteemed it to be his place in Grod's creation to 
 represent the secular life as contrasted with the 
 spiritual. It was his function to maintain the 
 Empire, which secured the peace of mankind, and 
 gave scope to the progress of Christian sentiment 
 within it ; and above all to maintain the grandeur 
 
 \ 
 
SL Leo the Great. 1 19 
 
 and solid strength of the imperial city, which was 
 the appointed type of the Empire and of the world 
 in general. Tertullian, in the third century, never 
 imagined that a Caesar could be converted to the 
 Faith. Lactantius, in the fourth, would have shud- 
 dered at the idea of Eome ever ceasing to be the 
 imperial ruler of the nations. Thoughtful Church- 
 men could not fail to see, even in the flourishing era 
 of Constantine, that she was environed with awful 
 perils, and to apprehend perhaps that her days were 
 numbered ; but beyond the fall of Eome they could 
 see nothing, they could imagine no future upon 
 earth. They were convinced that with the end of 
 Eome would come the end of the world. As years 
 went on, and these perils thickened, this was the idea 
 which impressed itself most strongly upon the minds 
 of the believers. Here at last the adherents of the 
 rival persuasions were in accord. Both proclaimed 
 that Eome was necessary to the world, and would 
 last as long as the world lasted, and perish with it. 
 
 No doubt both Pagan and Christian were oppres- 
 sed with sad misgivings, as they saw the swarms of 
 barbarians closing around them, their emperors fled, 
 their legions withdrawn and scattered. But the 
 Pagans, for their part, still clung to their faith in 
 
1 20 St. Leo the Great. 
 
 Eoine herself, the nearest and dearest of all their 
 divinities. Her career throughout had been plainly 
 providential. Her gods had never failed her. Who 
 but they had repulsed the Etruscans and the Grauls, 
 and ' Antiochus, and the dreadful Hannibal'? All her 
 defeats, all her disasters had redounded finally to her 
 triumph, and her triumph had been extended over 
 three continents, and prolonged through twelve cen- 
 turies. From age to age oracles had pronounced 
 her eternal ; and her grandeur, her wealth, her inex- 
 haustible resources were all manifest tokens of her 
 immortality. Affronted as she was by the violence 
 of a Constantine, the craft of a Theodosius, or the 
 petulance of an Honorius, her people still rallied 
 round her, loved her, believed in her. They raised 
 their frantic appeal to the Powers which had so sig- 
 nally protected her, and refused to surrender the last 
 faint hope of a triumphant interposition in her 
 favour. But of this hope they required an outward 
 and visible token. They had looked to Eome herself 
 as the last pledge of their shattered creed. The fall 
 of Eome extorted from their lips a wail of disappoint- 
 ment and dismay, such as has never been heard in 
 the world before or since ; but with the fall of Eome 
 their creed was broken to atoms. 
 
 1 
 
St. Leo the Great. 121 
 
 The Christians, on the other hand, while still 
 expecting that the city and the world would perish 
 together, could cherish other hopes and livelier con- 
 solations. They could not have the same passionate 
 attachment to Eome, ' drunk with the blood of the 
 saints,' as was natural to the Pagans. Nor indeed 
 did their instincts point to the eternal duration of 
 any monument of mere worldly greatness. From 
 the first they were familiar with the expectation of 
 an impending consummation of all things. The 
 crisis had been long delayed : the Apostles had looked 
 for it, but had not seen it : twelve generations had 
 lived and died anticipating it ; but the time was not 
 yet. As the fall of Rome seemed more plainly 
 approaching, this expectation had waxed keener than 
 ever ; though now, perhaps, as the outward condition 
 of the Church was happier, the expectation was less 
 joyous and sanguine than of yore. But the Christian 
 could look beyond the ruin of the ancient city, even 
 though the city and the world should be dissolved in 
 one common destruction. He believed in 'another 
 city, not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.' 
 To the believer whose faith was firm and hearty, the 
 vision of the new Jerusalem more than compensated 
 for the impending dissolution of Rome. 
 
122 St. Leo the Great. 
 
 But Rome was now sacked, ruined, discrowned, 
 depopulated ; yet the world did not perish. The 
 people began to return and repair their desolate 
 habitations. The ruin proved less overwhelming 
 than in their despair they had imagined it. Though 
 never again to be the queen of the nations, Eome 
 might yet continue to be one of the greatest of pro- 
 vincial centres. Then it was that the Christians 
 came boldly to the front, and Augustine put forth in 
 his ' City of God ' the manifesto, as we may call it, 
 of the Church against the worship of the City of 
 Man, by which the Pagans had been so fatally 
 beguiled. In this elaborate treatise he first soothes 
 the excitement of the Christian sufferers. While he 
 mainly exonerates them from the guilt which has 
 brought down this visitation upon a wicked world, 
 he shows them how they too may regard it as a 
 warning and a trial. He then reminds his Pagan 
 brethren, by a review of their past history, how vain 
 was their presumptuous assurance that Eome was 
 protected by a special Providence ; how often, how 
 signally she had been afflicted by famine and pesti- 
 lence, by foreign wars and by civil dissensions. 
 Ancient as it was, the Empire of Rome had not yet 
 attained the twelve hundred and sixty years of the 
 
S/. Leo the Great. 
 
 Assyrian Babylon ; yet Babylon had not been im- 
 mortal. And from thence he proceeds to invite all 
 Dfiankind to accept the revelation of the divine 
 Scriptures, which declare that their true and eternal 
 city is not Eome at all, is no material and visible 
 structure, but the heavenly creation of the Divine 
 Artificer — the spiritual commonwealth of which all 
 the servants of Grod are citizens. For, in fact, all 
 mankind form two rival commonwealths or cities : 
 ' those who live after the flesli,' as does the natural 
 man ; and ' those who live after the Spirit,' that is, 
 according to the law of God. The City of Grod or 
 of Heaven is ever glorious, both in this world and 
 in the next; the City of Man, on the contrary, 
 swayed by the lust of power, is itself the slave of 
 greed, even while it believes itself to be the mistress 
 of the nations. The actual existence of this City of 
 God is proved from the first by the long series of 
 prophecies and miracles which ranges through all the 
 Scripture history, declaring the operation of Divine 
 providence; the victories and the defeats of the 
 people of God equally attest His care of them, 
 and the glorious end to which all things are tending 
 together. Here is consolation, here is triumph, here 
 is the arcanum Imperii, the secret of the divine 
 
124 '^^- Leo the Great. 
 
 Empire. This remarkable treatise, whatever its defects 
 of method and precision, strikes the key-note of all 
 Christian Apologies in after time. The Pagans can 
 make no reply. They have lost all heart and all 
 faith and all hope. The tradition of their ancient 
 superstitions, driven from the cities and resorts of 
 the multitude, may still linger in the fields and vil- 
 lages. The last vestiges of their worship may still 
 appear faintly and dubiously for centuries ; nay, they 
 have adhered, as we know, like parasites to the cere- 
 monial of Christian churches, their origin forgotten 
 or disguised from the common eye ; but the old 
 living creed of Jupiter and Saturn, of Bel and 
 Mithras, has ceased to be a power in the world from 
 this time for ever. 
 
 Yet, I say we must be circumspect and measure 
 our words ; we must not be too sanguine of the ex- 
 tinction of the natural instincts of Paganism, which 
 will never wholly die out of human hearts, but will 
 reappear again and again, with new names and under 
 new conditions, even in the bosom of the true 
 religion. Our task, a critical and a delicate task, must 
 now be to examine the effect of this signal overthrow 
 of Pagan creeds upon the profession of Christianity 
 itself; and I must ask you to go back with me for a 
 
Sf. Leo the Great. 125 
 
 few moments to an earlier period, and trace the ten- 
 dencies of the Church which are now about to de- 
 velope into bolder action. 
 
 From the day when Constantino first abandoned 
 his ancient capital, Eome had gradually dwindled 
 into a provincial city. The names of consuls and 
 senate might still remain, but they were now titles 
 only, no longer forces. The municipal affairs of the 
 venerable burgh were conducted by a Prefect, a crea- 
 ture of the Emperor, in whose appointment the 
 people had no voice or interest. For the most 
 part they rendered obedience indeed to the officer 
 thus set over them, for they were accustomed to 
 obey; but their obedience, devoid of love or con- 
 fidence, was never proof against the whim or passion 
 of the moment, as they often made him feel. The 
 Prefect of Eome sat at least upon a thorny eminence. 
 
 But the Bishop meanwhile had attained a far 
 higher position than before. Constantino, on his 
 first and only visit to the city in the middle of the 
 fourth century, had required Liberius to join in the 
 general proscription which the Arian party, then 
 dominant in the East, had inflicted upon Athanasius. 
 The orthodox believers were stronger at Eome, and 
 their Bishop did not easily yield. When the 
 
126 St. Leo the Great, 
 
 Emperor withdrew, he acted more boldly. He now 
 received Athanasius with open arms, and defied the 
 officer who was sent from the court to overawe him. 
 A struggle ensued. Liberius was summoned to 
 attend his master at Milan; his contumacy was 
 punished, and he was banished into Thrace, the 
 Siberia of the Romans. During his absence, the 
 Emperor thrust a rival prelate into his see. The 
 Christian people at Rome resented both the indignity 
 to their old pastor, and the irregularity of the new 
 appointment. Felix, the intruder, proved to be an 
 Arian. The Church was all the more confirmed in 
 its determination to resist. The faithful refused 
 to enter their accustomed basilicas. The women, 
 more impetuous than the men, came in long proces- 
 sion, like the Roman matrons of old, to remonstrate 
 with the heretical tyrant. Constantius was surpri- 
 sed and attempted to compromise, declaring that 
 Liberius and Felix should be bishops of Rome con- 
 jointly. ' Shall we have factions in the Church as 
 well as in the circus ? ' rejoined the angry multitude. 
 ' One God, one Christ, one Bishop ! ' was the uni- 
 versal cry among them. The Emperor, in his 
 perplexity, released Liberius from captivity; and 
 then left the question to settle itself, as over-sapient 
 
S^. Leo the Great. 127 
 
 advisers so often counsel us in similar eases to do. 
 But the people would allow of no double sovereignty. 
 When Felix attempted to perform episcopal functions 
 in public, they broke into open riot. The baths and 
 even the streets were deluged in blood. The factions 
 of the old tribunes of the people were renewed. 
 Eventually Felix fled, and left his rival in possession. 
 But when Constantius held a council at Ariminum, 
 in which the Arian tenets were substantially 
 sanctioned, the Bishop of Eome kept prudently or 
 proudly aloof, and Rome herself was not stained by 
 any condescension to heresy : an exemption whereby 
 her consideration in Christendom was, no doubt, 
 highly exalted. 
 
 The consideration to which Rome had now at- 
 tained as the Christian metropolis, was perhaps the 
 more marked from the wide-spread indifference to 
 religious creeds which could not fail to follow upon 
 the protracted agitation of popular opinion on the 
 subject. The soldiers of the apostate Julian, the 
 same who had been content to attend their leader's 
 daily sacrifices to Sol and Hercules, chose themselves 
 a nominal Christian for their Imperator on his death, 
 and allowed him to conduct their retreat under the 
 Christian standard of the Labarum. Jovian, a care- 
 
128 St. Leo the Great. 
 
 less soldier himself, accepted the ascendancy of the 
 Christian Church ; but he tolerated both heretics and 
 Pagans. He restored Athanasius to his episcopal 
 see, but he exercised no severity against the Arians. 
 Kome he abandoned, during his short reign of a few 
 months only, to the encroachments of the bishops as 
 the popular favourites. These encroachments daily 
 assumed a higher significance, to which the Pagans 
 were constrained to submit, while they accepted in 
 sullen silence the indulgence which Valentinian, the 
 next of the Emperors, extended to their proscribed 
 usages. The priesthoods of the Pagan cult were still 
 occasionally assumed by persons of distinction; it 
 appears that altars and shrines were still, recent 
 edicts notwithstanding, erected here and there to 
 the ancient divinities. The Emperor continued to 
 affect the style of Sovereign Pontiff. The main- 
 tenance of these forms had perhaps little meaning. 
 The vulgar are ever wont to retain a scruple at the 
 omission of outward ceremonies, long after they have 
 ceased to attach to them any intelligent belief. The 
 real active belief of the age was fixed, in fact, as far 
 as it was Pagan, upon sorcery and magic. I question 
 whether the creed of Julian had any other positive 
 basis than this. 
 
S^. Leo the Great. 129 
 
 But meanwhile the rigour of the ecclesiastical 
 rule at Rome was making a great impression upon 
 the mass of the people, who saw in it, if nothing 
 more, at least a step towards the revival of the 
 ancient popular prerogatives. On the death of 
 Liberius in 366, the struggle for the succession again 
 broke into popular violence and resulted in a san- 
 guinary contest. It is not in the chronicles of the 
 Church only that the fatal rivalry of Damasus and 
 Ursicinus is emblazoned. The heathen historian of 
 the period relates the incident in the same spirit 
 with which Livy described so many ages before the 
 civil strife of consuls and tribunes. The prize, 
 says Ammianus, was magnificent : it conferred 
 wealth and splendour ; it secured the devotion of 
 women of the highest rank ; it placed the fortunate 
 aspirant on the pinnacle of fashion as well as of 
 luxury. The election was in the hands of the whole 
 multitude of believers; but the rules by which it 
 was conducted were perhaps but imperfectly deter- 
 mined. Each of the candidates claimed a legal 
 victory ; but in fact, the quarrel seems to have been 
 decided by arms, and all accounts agree that so great 
 was the tumult, so fierce and numerous the com- 
 batants on either side, that the Prefect confessed 
 
 K 
 
130 SL Leo the Great. 
 
 himself unable to maintain the peace between them, 
 and retired in confusion beyond the walls. The 
 riot lasted apparently for several days, and spread 
 from quarter to quarter. In one Christian church, 
 and on a single day, as many as a hundred and sixty 
 persons are reported to have lost their lives. But 
 Damasus, it was maliciously said, was the favourite 
 with the Eoman ladies. He remained finally in 
 possession, and has been recognised as the true bishop 
 by ecclesiastical tradition. 
 
 Such then was the progress which the See of 
 Rome was already making in the fourth century in 
 the reverential regard of the Roman citizens. The 
 same leading cause which had produced this critical 
 revolution in popular sentiment continued to operate 
 with increasing power as every year weakened their 
 respect for the secular rule. The episcopal chair of 
 Rome had become a prize for an ambition which 
 could not always be confined to spiritual objects. 
 The prelate of the most venerable of cities could 
 henceforth hardly resist the temptation to encroach 
 upon his fellow-bishops. The temporal fall of the 
 Imperial metropolis tended to throw a brighter light 
 upon her ecclesiastical claims. The separation of 
 the East and the West had already enhanced the 
 
S/. Leo the Great, 
 
 religious dignity of the ancient capital. The great 
 Eastern patriarchates of Antioch, Alexandria, and 
 Jerusalem had up to that time all held themselves 
 equal, if not superior to Eome, Constantinople had 
 even assumed certain airs of supremacy over all. 
 The General Councils which bad defined the Faith 
 at Nicsea and Constantinople had been composed 
 almost wholly of Orientals. The great Doctors of 
 the Church, the men who had defended or diffused 
 the common Faith, had been mostly Grreeks by origin 
 and language. None had been Eomans, and it was 
 rarely, till the fourth century, that any one of them 
 had written in the Latin tongue. When Athanasius, 
 exiled from Alexandria, came to Italy a.nd Graul, it 
 was three years before he could learn enough of the 
 language of the West to address its congregations 
 in public. But this curious fact shows that the 
 Western Christians were now no longer the little 
 Greek colony of the first and second centuries. 
 Christianity had become the national religion of the 
 native races. The Romans might now feel that they 
 were becoming again a people ; that their glorious 
 career was assuming, as it were, a new point of 
 departure. The Phoenix was actually rising from its 
 ashes. No wonder then that the bishop of their own 
 K 2 
 
132 St. Leo the Great. 
 
 choice, though held perhaps in little account beyond 
 the ^gean or the Adriatic, reigned supreme in their 
 veneration, inheriting as it were the inviolable majesty 
 of the old tribune of the people, and gained more 
 and more on the estimation of all the West. There 
 was no Church in Graul or Spain, none, except Eome, 
 even in Italy, that could boast to have been founded 
 by an Apostle ; but Eome was under the protection 
 not of one Apostle only, but of two. The most 
 cultivated even of the Pagans still repaired to Rome 
 as the capital of Western art and literature, and the 
 rivalry of the two religions, supported on either side 
 by all the eloquence, all the pomp and circumstance, 
 which each could muster, gave a peculiar dignity of 
 a novel kind to the spot on which the Old World and 
 the New seemed to have met once for all for combat 
 or for compromise. And there lay the question of 
 questions, the solution of which could not long be 
 delayed; should it be a combat, deadly, inter- 
 necinal? or should it be a compromise, a trans- 
 action between them ? 
 
 Let me ask you to consider more closely with 
 me, what was the nature of the superior eminence 
 which the Bishop of Rome was now holding in the 
 city. Commanding as was the position which his 
 
6V. Leo the Great. 133 
 
 popular election gave him in the imagination of the 
 people — of his people, as we may now call them — we 
 must not suppose that the Emperor had actually 
 conceded to him the appointment to civil offices, or 
 the ordering of military affairs. No, the bishop's 
 authority was still essentially spiritual ; it consisted 
 in the dominion over men's thoughts in religious 
 matters ; in the direction of their consciences. It 
 was a government by sentiment ; and, of course, as 
 such it was limited on ail sides. But the fact was — 
 and there is no fact more important in estimating 
 the character of the age before us — that the fifth 
 centmy was eminently a period when the control of 
 human affairs had fallen under the dictates of senti- 
 ment and opinion. Force had failed ; military rule 
 had collapsed; civilization, it was plain, could no 
 longer look to maintain itself by arms against im- 
 pending dissolution. But behind its broken ranks 
 another power was forming itself and creeping 
 without observation into the confidence of mankind. 
 The head of the Church militant at Kome, militant 
 against sins and idolatries, against spiritual ignor- 
 ance and barbarism and all the horrors in their train, 
 might be likened in the believer's imagination to an 
 Imperator in the field, requiring implicit obedience 
 
134 St, Leo the Great. 
 
 of the priests who regularly miDistered in sacred 
 things to the congregation placed under their care ; 
 of the flying squadrons of devotees and ascetics who 
 made incursions into the ranks of the enemy ; of the 
 trained divines who engaged in duel with the select 
 champions of the ancient philosophies, or undertook 
 the conversion of the chiefs of the Pagan invaders. 
 The organization of the Church was thus steadily 
 advancing, with the consent and support of the mul- 
 titude of believers. To Eome, as the centre of this 
 efficient discipline, the eyes of the faithful were most 
 constantly turned. The Bishop of Eome became 
 more than an ordinary chief pastor of an ordinary 
 flock ; he was, in fact, promptly accepted as the 
 commander of the whole spiritual armament ; to use 
 the phrase of a recent Cardinal, when he said to 
 them, March, they marched. The conduct of the 
 holy war, of the defence of Eome and therewith of 
 all human culture, at least of such remnant as was 
 left of them, was almost thrust into his hands. 
 Hence it was that the title of Papa or Pope, de- 
 rived from the East, where it was apjilied to the 
 spiritual father of the people, was at this time 
 voluntarily assigned him by the whole Latin Church, 
 as a token of superior honour and authority. Such 
 
S/. Leo the Great. 135 
 
 spontaneous concessions on the part of the Church 
 may have really outrun any conscious pretensions of 
 the bishop himself. But Leo, dating from the year 
 440, may be regarded as the first of the Popes who 
 contemplated a primacy of the Christian world. 
 Doubtless this daring prelate did assume and en- 
 force a special jurisdiction over the other neigh- 
 bouring bishops, who were entitled the Suburbica- 
 rians, from their proximity to the Italian capital 
 Doubtless, he fostered and took advantage of the 
 disputes then so rife in the Eastern Church ; he 
 undertook the guidance and control of distant Coun- 
 cils ; sometimes he made himself all the more con- 
 spicuous by his absence, when he claimed the right 
 to direct them through his deputies. Yet even Leo, 
 from whose reign the dogma of Papal supremacy 
 must in fairness be dated, could still little anticipate 
 the splendid destiny which awaited his successors. 
 He put forth no historical claims to power or even 
 to precedence ; nor did he incur the mortification to 
 which he would have been sometimes exposed, had he 
 done so, from the rebuffs of other prelates not mucli 
 less able nor much less proud than himself. Still, 
 the fact remains that the great Leo, ambitious and 
 imperious as we picture him, was merely floating in 
 
136 St, Leo the Great. 
 
 triumph on a wave of popular sentiment, which 
 was rising at the moment to demand a spiritual 
 Caesar to preside over the Empire of Christendom. 
 
 For at this moment the popular instinct could 
 not fail to perceive how strongly the conscience of 
 the barbarians had been affected by the spiritual 
 majesty of Christian Kome, The Northern hordes 
 had beaten down all armed resistance. They had 
 made a deep impression upon the strength of tlie 
 Eastern Empire ; they had, for a moment at least, 
 actually overcome the Western ; they had overrun 
 many of the fairest provinces, and had effected a 
 permanent lodgment in G-aul and Spain, and still 
 more recently in Africa. Yet in all these countries, 
 rude as they still were, they had submitted to accept 
 the creed of the Grospel. There was no such thing 
 as a barbarian Paganism established within the limits 
 of the Empire anywhere, except perhaps in furthest 
 Britain. Such had been the power of Christian 
 opinion. For, in fact, the barbarians had received 
 their first impressions of the Faith before they settled 
 down as conquerors within the limits of the Empire. 
 They had known something of its missionary spirit, 
 of its simple spirit of love and justice, before they 
 found it seated in pomp and power by the side of 
 
Sf. Leo the Great. 137 
 
 secular rulers. They found Eome. abandoned by her 
 Caesars and her legions, standing erect under the 
 shield of her priests and bishop, who spoke to them 
 of a God of peace and mercy. Never had such an 
 appeal been made to the unsophisticated instincts of 
 human nature. So deeply had the barbarian hosts 
 been struck by the majesty of the Christian arma- 
 ments, that they had yielded up their ancient super- 
 stitions, abandoned their unhallowed rites, burnt 
 their abominable idols, devoted themselves to the 
 singing of divine psalms, and tlie offering of the 
 holiest sacrifice. True, the Groths, both of the East 
 and the West, the Burgundians, the Sueves, the 
 Vandals, had all, or most of them (perhaps the Bur- 
 gundians should be excepted) embraced Christianity 
 under the imperfect theory of the Arians ; but, 
 heretics though they were, they had imbibed enough 
 of the spirit of the true Faith to lay down their arms 
 at the gates of the Christian churches, to respect the 
 sanctity of Christian Eome, and screen her from the 
 worst of pillage. Was not the time now at hand 
 when they might be taught to embrace the Faith in 
 its integrity, and acknowledge as divine the authorit}^ 
 of such a Caesar as Leo ? 
 
 The attitude of spiritual defiance which Eome 
 
S^. Leo the Great. 
 
 had assumed in the face of the barbarians, when she 
 seemed to cast herself upon God and Christ as her 
 protectors, upon the Apostles Peter and Paul as her 
 patrons, upon her bishop or pope as the minister of 
 the Divine government, constituted, we may readily 
 suppose, a really effective bulwark. She continued 
 for at least one generation free from further aggres- 
 sion. Of the Northern peoples who had so long 
 threatened her, great multitudes had settled in the 
 city and tbe provinces ; they had generally accepted 
 the Christian faith, and become absorbed into the mass 
 of believers ; they had accustomed the native races 
 to regard the new-comers as friends rather than as 
 enemies, while they had learnt themselves to look to 
 the native races as their masters in culture and 
 religion, rather than as objects of plunder. In the 
 middle of the fifth century the Eomans would have 
 anticipated with less alarm a second attack by a 
 second Alaric, connected as he would be with a great 
 portion of their society by ties of blood as well as by 
 common baptism. But in the middle of the fifth 
 century the Roman world was suddenly threatened by 
 another and a greater peril. The whole of central 
 Europe was at the moment ravaged by the invasion 
 of the Huns, a horde of more unmitigated ferocity 
 
6V. Leo the Great. 139 
 
 than any that had come before them, of brutal 
 savages as well as heathens. The Groths, fierce as 
 they were, had shown from the first that instinct of 
 moral culture which they have transmitted to their 
 descendants through so many generations; for the 
 Groths of Alaric were generically the same as the 
 Germans, the Scandinavians, the English of modern 
 history. The Huns appertained to another race 
 altogether : their character has beea less distinctly 
 marked; their descent through later ages less de- 
 finitely traced ; few modern peoples would thank us 
 for ascribing to them a Hunnish ancestry ; let us be 
 content with saying vaguely, they were the Cossacks 
 of the olden time. Now these Huns or Cossacks 
 were overrunning the greater part of central Eiu-ope. 
 Their progress had been everywhere marked by 
 atrocities more signal than any that had been in- 
 flicted by the goodnatured tliough greedy Teutons ; 
 they had swallowed up everything, they had pro- 
 duced nothing. Defying all the influences of Southern 
 creeds and civilization, they had proved themselves 
 untamed and untameable, inhuman, and if it be 
 permitted to any one of Grod's creatures to say so 
 of another, anti-human. Attila, their leader, had 
 vaunted himself as the Scourge of God ; it was only 
 
140 S^. Leo the Great. 
 
 as the arbitrary wielder of a scourge that he re- 
 cognised Deity at all ; it was only under the form of 
 a sword that he even pretended to worship Him. His 
 fury was the more exasperated by the check he had 
 received in the gallant defence of Orleans, and at the 
 great battle of Chalons, which had liberated Graul 
 from his sweeping devastations, and hurled his reck- 
 less warriors in confusion across the Ehine. It was 
 at Cologne, and apparently at this very period, that 
 he executed the brutal massacre from which has 
 sprung the legend, variously related, of the eleven 
 thousand martyred virgins of Britain. It is a pretty 
 story, known, no doubt, to many of my hearers, and 
 worth the reading of all ; but the germ of truth con- 
 tained in it is but slender, though some truth there 
 certainly is. I accept at least the investigation of 
 it made by no less a critic than Cardinal Wiseman, 
 who, seeking to maintain its substantial veracity, 
 has, I allow, succeeded in showing that, on this very 
 spot and at this very time, Attila put to the sword 
 a great crowd of victims whom he had probably borne 
 off with him from Graul ; but they were not eleven 
 thousand in number, nor were they martyrs to the 
 Faith, nor may they claim the honourable title of 
 virgins ; for they were an uncounted multitude of all 
 
S^. Leo the Great. 141 
 
 ages and either sex, as some existing remains are 
 said still to demonstrate, who were slain not for their 
 Christian Faith, but from mere lust of slaughter. 
 
 Such, however, was Attila, the Scourge of God ; 
 and such the trembling people of the South well 
 knew him to be. It required no stretch of the 
 imagination to depict him in the still darker colours 
 of popular tradition. Repulsed from Graul, he re- 
 appeared two years later, south of the Alps. Aetius, 
 who had then baffled him, was now charged with 
 the defence of Italy ; but his forces were far away on 
 the northern frontier. The Burgundians and Visi- 
 goths, who had aided him in the defence of Graul, 
 gave him no support at a distance from their own 
 territories. The courtiers of the cowardly Emperor 
 insinuated that he was a traitor, and the dubious 
 charge has found a place in history; but in all 
 periods of national disaster the first cry is, ' Treachery.' 
 Aetius has not unfitly been designated ' the last of 
 the Romans,' and we would not willingly lend an ear 
 to such an imputation against his Roman virtue. 
 There was, however, another Roman at hand, not 
 unworthy of the crisis. Leo himself was a Roman ; 
 at least, he was a native of an Etruscan village a few 
 miles from Rome. It was to Leo that the citizens 
 
142 St. Leo the Great. 
 
 fortunately turned, in this their dire extremity, to 
 save them, not by arms, but by prayers ; not by the 
 majesty of the Empire, but by the majesty of the 
 Christian profession and priesthood. To Leo they 
 had already turned on a former occasion, when their 
 see had fallen vacant, and none but the Bishop of 
 Eome, as they were assured, could reconcile the quarrel 
 between two of their rival generals. Straightway 
 the clergy, the senate, and the people, with one 
 united voice, had then raised Leo, even in his 
 absence, to the vacant seat; and the boldness and 
 firmness with which he had in his high office com- 
 bined the Churchman and the patriot, had inspired 
 both Christians and Pagans with unbounded admira- 
 tion and confidence. At the crisis now impending, 
 while they deputed the prefect Try ge tins and the 
 consular Avienus to represent the secular government, 
 they joined with these illustrious personages their 
 chosen bishop, to complete their embassy, and stand 
 between them and the heathen as the minister of 
 God and the Church. The historians throw the 
 prefect and the consular altogether into th^ shade, 
 and give all the glory of the event to Leo, pope and 
 bishop. To Leo they attribute the dismay of the 
 barbarian, when he beheld the man of Grod appear 
 
S^. Leo the Great. 143 
 
 unarmed in his wild encampment, robed, as we may 
 suppose from the remains found in after ages in his 
 sepulchre, in broidered pall and purple chasuble, and 
 the mitre on his head ; ^ when he was reminded that 
 the conqueror who had entered Kome before him 
 had not survived his unholy triumph the space of 
 one year. It was reported, and easily believed, that 
 the Apostles Peter and Paul had appeared to Attila 
 in a vision, and warned him to refrain from the 
 attack. Whether he was loaded with presents by 
 way of tribute — whether he received further assurance 
 that the Emperor's sister, who had been formally 
 betrothed to him, should be duly transmitted to his 
 palace beyond the Danube — it remains at least on 
 record that Attila^ the Scourge of God, stayed his 
 terrible career, and withdrew beyond the Alps. His 
 sudden and mysterious death, so quickly following, 
 marks an epoch in European history. The Huns, or 
 Cossacks, have never again made themselves quite so 
 formidable to civilized society. 
 
 ' Th^e particulars are certified by Thierry (^Hist. d' Attila, 
 ii. 210) * om an ancient Life of the Saints : — ' Erat indutus 
 pontificalibus indumentis, scilicet plan eta sive casula lata more 
 antiquo, et purpura coloris castanei. . . . Super humero dextro 
 crux parva rubri coloris qufe erat pallii pontificalis, et aliam 
 crucem paulo longiorem ejusdem pallii supra pectus. . . . Telle 
 
144 '^^- Leo the Great. 
 
 It was not only as a great ruler and administrator 
 of the Church, as one whose abilities fully answered 
 to his opportunities for the foundation of an aggres- 
 sive ecclesiastical supremacy, that Leo holds the 
 most prominent place in his generation of Church- 
 men. The name of this pontiff is associated also 
 with all the leading polemics of the day. The deter- 
 mination of the Church Councils in the matters of 
 Nestorius and Eutyches seems to have been mainly 
 influenced by his authority ; it was to his decision at 
 least that the leaders of the Eastern Church were 
 too easily induced to submit their own irreconcilable 
 differences, to many of which Western orthodoxy 
 was generally indifferent. Under his influence the 
 Roman See was permitted to assume the spiritual 
 presidency of a general council ; all its acts had run 
 in the name of ' Leo, Bishop of the Universal Church,' 
 or * Leo, the blessed and universal Patriarch of the 
 great city of Rome.' Nevertheless, the apostolic See 
 
 est la description des vetemens pontificaiix avec lesquels saint 
 Leon fut enseveli, et qu'on trouva dans sa tombe lors de la 
 translation de ses reliques. On en pent voir tout le detail dans 
 les Bollandistes 4 la date du 11 avril. Nous devons ^ ce proc^s- 
 verbal de translation d'avoir pu decrire le costume que portait 
 saint Leon jl I'audience d'Attila, puisque c'etaient 1^ ses habits 
 pontificaux, et que son biographe nous dit qu'il aborda le roi des 
 Huns en costume pontifical, augustiore haHtu.' 
 
S^. Leo the Great. 145 
 
 of Eome had not been able to reduce Constantinople 
 to the level of other non-apostolic chairs. The 
 Eastern prelates, after the fashion of the East, were 
 willing to use complimentary language, such as might 
 convey to the West ideas which they did not prac- 
 tically accept themselves. The court language of 
 Constantinople bore a different significance among 
 the subtle Grreeks from what it seemed to imply to 
 the simpler and more straightforward Komans. But 
 in fact, both parties might be conscious of this dif- 
 ference, and count upon taking their own advantage 
 of it. The progress of the Papacy in the West was 
 liable to no possible misconception. Leo wrested 
 by main force, it may be said, the primacy of Graul 
 from Hilary, the Archbishop of Aries, and cut off 
 that distinguished prelate himself from communion 
 with Eome ; * inasmuch,' so he said, ' as he refuseth 
 to be any longer subject to the blessed Peter.' He 
 prevailed on the feeble Emperor, Valentinian III., to 
 condemn his opponent as a traitor, in an edict in 
 which ' the whole world ' was required to acknow- 
 ledge *the Eoman See as its director and governor,' 
 and which further decreed that henceforth not only 
 'no Gallic bishops, but no bishop of any other pro- 
 
 L 
 
146 S^. Leo the Great. 
 
 vince, be permitted, in contradiction to ancient 
 custom, to do anything without the authority of 
 the venerable pope of the eternal city.' ' 
 
 But, to pass over subjects hardly suitable to oui* 
 hasty historical sketch, I will only refer to the ser- 
 mons which this great divine addressed to his own 
 peculiar flock at Rome, to help us in forming an 
 
 ' Mr. Greenwood, who refers to this edict in the Codex 
 I'heodosianus, remarks upon it in very considerate terms : — 
 
 * Both Leo the Pontiff and Hilary the Archbishop belonged to 
 that noble company of combatants for religion and virtue that 
 often springs up, as it were, from the earth, when vice and cor- 
 ruption appear triumphant in the world. But they fought in 
 the same cause with different weapons: Hilary wielded the 
 "sword of the spirit," in preference to that of the flesh ; Leo 
 believed himself justified in using either, as occasion might 
 require. Both desired "to live in unity and godly love with 
 the brethren," But Hilary grounded his hope of success upon 
 the maintenance of the Christian law; Leo upon the acqui- 
 sition of extrinsic power to suppress and punish disobedience. 
 Such opposite views of the conditions of Christian fellowship 
 could never meet but in conflict with each other. But Hilary 
 had the advantage of his adversary, for he could forgive ; to the 
 other nothing was gained till he extorted an absolute surrender 
 to the Petrine claims. To this Hilary could not consent, and 
 he died at the early age of forty-eight, out of the communion 
 of Rome, but out of no other. His admirable brethren took 
 little heed of the frowns of Rome : they continued in inter- 
 course with him ; the privileges of his metropolitan church 
 remained unimpaired ; and the name of Hilary of Aries figures 
 to this day in the Roman calendar by the side of that of his 
 canonized opponent.' — Cathedra Petriy i. 355. 
 
6V. Leo the Great. 147 
 
 idea of the state of Christian sentiment which 
 prevailed in the period now before us.^ The 
 bishops of Constantinople and other Eastern cities 
 had overflowed in popular discourses, but the 
 prelates of the West seem, for whatever reason, to 
 have been far more reticent. Leo is the first of the 
 Eoman pontiffs whose addresses from the pulpit have 
 
 1 I allow myself the pleasure of presenting the reader with 
 the fine sketch of Leo's character given by Milman, Sist. of 
 Latin Chwt'ch, bk. ii. ch. iv. : — 
 
 ' Leo was a Roman in sentiment as in birth. All that sur- 
 vived of Rome, of her unbounded ambition, her inflexible per- 
 severance, her dignity in defeat, her haughtiness of language, 
 her belief in her own eternity and in her indefeasible title to 
 universal dominion, her respect for traditionary and written 
 law, and of unchangeable custom, might seem concentred in 
 him alone. The union of the Churchman and the Roman is 
 singularly displayed in his sermon on the day of St. Peter and 
 St. Paul ; their conjoint authority was that double title to 
 obedience on which he built his claim to power, but chiefly as 
 the successor of St. Peter, for whom he asserted a proto-Aposto- 
 lic dignity. From Peter and through Peter all the other 
 Apostles derived their power. Nor less did he assert the 
 destined perpetuity of Rome, who had only obtained her tem- 
 poral autocracy to prepare the way, and as a guarantee for her 
 
 greater spiritual supremacy Pagan Rome had been the 
 
 head of the heathen world ; the empire of her divine religion 
 
 was to transcend that of her worldly dominion It was 
 
 because Rome was the capital of the world, that the chief of 
 the Apostles was chosen to be her teacher, in order that from 
 the head of the world the light of truth might be revealed o> ei 
 all the earth.' 
 
 L 2 
 
148 SL Leo the Great. 
 
 descended to posterity. Of these sermons indeed 
 there remain to us more than a hundred in number. 
 They dwell, some on the primacy of St. Peter and 
 the supremacy of the Eoman See, some on the mystery 
 of our Lord's nativity and His divine nature, some 
 on the lessons of humility and obedience inculcated 
 by His holy life ; nor are they silent on the redemp- 
 tion of man through His death and passion, and the 
 sanctifying power of the Holy Spirit.^ But they are 
 especially urgent on the merits of charity and fast- 
 ing. There are few of them that do not glance at 
 least on one or both of these favourite graces, while 
 they are plainly defective in the grounds on which, 
 at least by implication, they place them. For they 
 enjoin them simply as formal observances due to the 
 command of Grod Himself, with little or no reference 
 to any duty to one's own moral nature or to one's 
 neighbours' happiness, to the duty of personal self- 
 control, or of compassion for our fellow creatures; 
 with little or none throughout to the practical lesson 
 
 ' In the treatise Be Vocatione Omnium Gentium Leo enforces 
 very fully and elaborately the Augiistinian doctrines of Grace 
 and Freewill, and is sorely exercised in explaining the condem- 
 nation of unbaptized infants: — * Verumtamen de hac altitu- 
 dine discretionis Dei non conturbabitnr cor humilitatis nostras, 
 sifirma ac stabili fide omne judicium Dei esse justumcredamus.' 
 — ii. 21. 
 
St Leo the Great. 149 
 
 of our blessed Lord's example, who ' went about doing 
 good,' ' or to the Divine process by which fallen man 
 is justified and reconciled to his Creator. Such, to 
 my apprehension, is the moral defect of St. Leo's 
 teaching which I am bound to notice, at the same 
 time that I remark its comparative freedom from 
 the errors which we associate with so much of the 
 teaching of the fifth century. 
 
 But I have a further and a special object in 
 making this remark. It will be admitted, I trust, 
 without entering upon disquisitions which would be 
 inappropriate to this occasion, that the corruptions 
 of Christian faith against which our own national 
 Church and many others rose indignantly at the 
 Eeformation had for the most part struck their foun- 
 dations deep in the course of the fifth century ; that 
 though they had sprung up even from an earlier 
 period, and though they developed more in some 
 directions, and assumed more fixity, in the darker 
 times that followed, yet the working of the true 
 
 * The common defect of excessive self-introspection appears 
 strikingly in the popiilar treatise on the ' Imitation of Christ,' 
 in which there is no reference whatever to our Lord's example 
 of active benevolence in going about doing good. ' Multum 
 facit qui multum diligit ' is the sum of all the author has to say 
 de operibus ex caritate factis. See Thomas ^ Kempis, Be Imit. 
 Ch?nst., lib. i. c. 15. 
 
150 St. Leo the Great. 
 
 Christian leaven among the masses was never more 
 faint, the approximation of Christian usage to the 
 manners and customs of Paganism never really closer, 
 than in the age of which we are now speaking. We 
 have before us many significant examples of the 
 facility with which the most intelligent of the 
 Pagans accepted the outward rite of Christian bap- 
 tism, and made a nominal profession of the Faith, 
 while they retained and openly practised, without 
 rebuke, without remark, with the indulgence even of 
 genuine believers, the rites and usages of the Pagan- 
 ism they pretended to have abjured. We find 
 abundant records of the fact that personages high in 
 office, such as consuls and other magistrates, while 
 administering the laws by which the old idolatries 
 were proscribed, actually performed Pagan rites and 
 even erected public statues to Pagan divinities. 
 Still more did men, high in the respect of their 
 fellow-Christians, allow themselves to cherish senti- 
 ments utterly at variance with the definitions of the 
 Church. Take the instance of the illustrious bishop 
 Synesius. Was he a Christian, was he a Pagan, who 
 shall say ? He was famous in the schools of Alexan- 
 dria as a man of letters, a teacher of the ancient 
 philosophies, an admirer of the Pagan Hypatia. The 
 
S^. Leo the G^^eat. 151 
 
 Christian people of Ptolemais, enchanted with his 
 talents, demand him for their bishop. He protests — 
 not indeed that he is an unbeliever — but that his 
 life and habits are not suitable to so high an office. 
 He has a wife whom he cannot abandon, as the 
 manners of the age might require of him ; whom he 
 will not consort with secretly, as the manners of the 
 age would, it seems, allow. ' But further, I cannot 
 believe,' he adds, 'that the human soul has been 
 breathed into flesh and blood ; I will not teach that 
 this everlasting world of matter is destined to anni- 
 hilation ; the resurrection, as taught by the Church, 
 seems to me a doubtful and questionable doctrine. 
 I am a philosopher, and cannot preach to the people 
 popularly.' In short, he maintains to all appear- 
 ance, that if he is a believer in Jesus Christ he is a 
 follower of Plato; and such doubtless were many 
 others. The people leave him his wife and his 
 opinions, and insist that he shall be their bishop. He 
 retains his family ties, his philosophy, his Platonism, 
 his rationalism, and accepts the government of the 
 Church notwithstanding. Again we ask, was Syne- 
 sius a Christian or a Pagan ? The instance of such a 
 bishop, one probably among many, is specially signi- 
 ficant ; but the same question arises with regard to 
 
152 St, Leo the Great. 
 
 other men of eminence of the period. Was Boethius, 
 a century later, the imitator of Cicero, Christian or 
 Pagan ? Was Simplicius, the commentator on Plato? 
 Was Ausonius, the playful poet and amiable friend 
 of the bishop Paulinus, who celebrates Christ in one 
 poem, and scatters his allusions to Pagan mythology 
 indiscriminately in many others ? We know that 
 Libanius, the intimate friend and correspondent of 
 Basil, was a Pagan of the Pagans ; but he did not 
 on that account forfeit the confidence of a sainted 
 father of the Christian Church. So indifferent as 
 Christians seem to have been at this period to their 
 own creed, so indifferent to the creed of their friends 
 and associates, we cannot wonder if it has left us few 
 or but slight traces of a vital belief in the prin- 
 ciples of Divine redemption. 
 
 We must make indeed large allowance for the 
 intellectual trials of an age of transition, when it 
 was not given to every one to see his way between 
 the demands urged upon an intelligent faith by the 
 traditions of a brilliant past on the one hand, and 
 the intimations of an obscure and not a cheerful 
 future on the other. We hardly realize, perhaps, 
 the pride with which the schools of Athens and 
 Alexandria still regarded their thousand years of 
 
SL Leo the Great. 153 
 
 academic renown, while the Christian Church was 
 
 slowly building up the recent theological systems on 
 
 which its own foundations were to be secured for the 
 
 ages to follow. We need not complain of Leo and 
 
 other Christian Doctors, if they shrank, as I think 
 
 they did, from rushing again into polemics with the 
 
 remnant of the philosophers, whose day, they might 
 
 think, was sure to close at no distant date. But the 
 
 real corruption of the age was shown in the unstinted 
 
 adoption of Pagan usages in the ceremonial of the 
 
 Christian Church, with all the baneful effects they 
 
 could not fail to produce on the spiritual training of 
 
 the people. There are not wanting indeed passage^ 
 
 in the popular teaching of St. Leo, in which he beats 
 
 the air with angry denunciations of auguries and 
 
 sortilege and magic, stigmatizes idolatry as the 
 
 worship of demons, and the devil as the father of 
 
 Pagan lies.^ But neither Leo, nor, I think, the con- 
 
 ' In his 26tli Sermon the Pontiff formally reproves the 'im- 
 piety,' then common, of turning and bowing to the East as the 
 quarter in which the sun rises. 'NonnuUi etiam Christiani 
 adeo se religiose facere putant, ut priusquam ad B. Petri Apos- 
 toli Basilicam, qu£e uni Deo vivo et vero est dedicata, perve- 
 niant, superatis gradibus, quibus ad suggestum ar^e superioris 
 ascenditur, converso corpore ad nascentem se Solem reflectant, 
 et curvatis cervicibus in honorem se splendidi orbis inclinent.' 
 The altar at St. Peter's was then, we must suppose, as now, at 
 the western end of the church. 
 
154 St. Leo the Great. 
 
 temporary Doctors of the Church, seem to have had 
 an adequate sense of the process by which the whole 
 essence of Paganism was, throughout their age, con- 
 stantly percolating the ritual of the Church and 
 the hearts of the Christian multitude. It is not to 
 these that we can look for a warning that the fasts 
 prescribed by the Church had their parallel in the 
 abstinence imposed by certain Pagan creeds, and 
 required to be guarded and explained to the people 
 in their true Christian significance ; that the 
 Monachism they extolled so warmly, and which 
 spread so rapidly, was in its origin a purely Pagan 
 institution, common to the religions of India, Thibet, 
 and Syria, with much, no doubt, to excuse its extra- 
 vagance in the hapless condition of human life at the 
 period^ but with little or nothing to justify it in the 
 charters of our Christian belief; that the canonizing 
 of saints and martyrs, the honours paid them and 
 the trust reposed in them, were simply a revival of 
 the old Pagan mythologies ; that the multiplication 
 of formal ceremonies, with processions and lights and 
 incense and vestments, with images and pictures and 
 votive offerings, was a mere Pagan appeal to the 
 senses, such as can never fail to enervate man's moral 
 fibre ; that, in short, the general aspect of Christian 
 
S^. Leo the Great. 155 
 
 devotion, as it met the eye of the observer, was a 
 faint and rather frivolous imitation of the old Pagan 
 ritual, the object of which from first to last was not 
 to instruct, or elevate man's nature, but simply to 
 charm away the ills of life by adorning and beautify- 
 ing his present existence. 
 
 Surely, we must complain that all this manifest 
 evil was not denounced at the time by the teachers 
 of the Christian Church — nay, that it was rather 
 fostered and favoured by them. But we may detect 
 perhaps the instinctive feeling which blinded the un- 
 instructed people, and clouded the keener sense even 
 of their rulers. Fallen as she was from her high 
 estate, as a temporal sovereign, the Empire might 
 still be regarded as the last retreat of ancient civili- 
 zation, the last depository of the world's intellectual 
 and aesthetic treasures. Much as she had lost of 
 power, of wealth, of brilliancy, of influence and 
 authority — -though her gold had become dim, and the 
 glory of her towers and temples covered with dust 
 and disgraced with smoke, — yet she seemed to hold 
 on by the skirts to the Divine protection, which over- 
 awed the powers of the world, and turned the bar- 
 barian assailants into admirers and worshippers. The 
 Groths had crossed the Alps and Apennines breathing 
 
156 St. Leo the Great. 
 
 fire and slaughter against her, but the Groths had 
 accepted her humaner teaching, had filtered into 
 the mass of her population, and given it courage to 
 baffle the Huns, the Avars, and the Alans. These, 
 too, might in turn be expected to succumb to her 
 enlightening influence. For Rome still called 
 herself the Eternal City, and so we find her still 
 designated even by Christian preachers of the 
 fifth century. Under Leo she spoke more confi- 
 dently than ever, as one having spiritual authority. 
 And so the instinct of the Imperial people now urged 
 them to throw a veil over all they had lost of bril- 
 liancy and glory, and to save at least the little that 
 remained. They looked to the present only ; they 
 averted their eyes from the future. The Christian 
 Church, falling in with this popular feeling, clutched 
 at the remains of the earlier culture, and ignored, as 
 it would seem, all further development of its powers. 
 The creeds of antiquity, as you will have observed, 
 never looked forward. They all began with the 
 vision of a Golden Age, from which every step in 
 advance was only a step downwards. The progress 
 of truth and righteousness, the preparation of man 
 from age to age for a higher state of being, formed 
 no part of the creeds of Paganism. They formed no 
 
SL Leo the G^^eat. 1 5 7 
 
 part of the aspirations even of the philosophers. 
 Even an Epicurus and a Lucretius, those ultra- 
 Darwinians, who held that man sprang from earth 
 and stones, ' Tellus quern dura crearat,' asserted with 
 a sigh that his moral growth had soon reached its 
 height, and could henceforth only dwindle. Nothing 
 remained for the Pagan but to acquiesce in this 
 hopeless condition, and preserve while he could the 
 position he had for the moment attained. And so 
 sadly were the Christians of the fifth century pa- 
 ganized, so thoroughly had they imbibed the ruling 
 sentiment of the masses around them, that they too 
 looked now no further than the present, imagined 
 no progress, no development, no extension of the 
 knowledge of Christ, beyond the narrow horizon that 
 lay around them. They were content that the limits 
 of Christian empire should remain stationary, while 
 the spirit of Christian belief was actually declining 
 among them. For so it must always be : if the 
 Gospel ceases at any time to be an advancing power 
 in the world, an aggressive power upon the frontier 
 of darkness and unbelief, it will assuredly decline in 
 force and vitality, its salt will have lost its savour. 
 But, as I cannot but think, even the leaders of the 
 Church were at this period blind to this condition of 
 
158 St. Leo the Great. 
 
 its being. They made no advance beyond the bor- 
 ders of the Eoman world ; they made no aggression 
 upon the blank domains of barbarism in the distance. 
 They sought to maintain the actual order of afifairs 
 without regard to the future. Nay, they averted 
 their eyes, and shrank from looking to the future. 
 They were afraid of any spiritual movement which 
 should extend the limits of their dark outlook. They 
 scouted the more spiritual reformers of the age, 
 whom Grod will never suffer to be altogether wanting 
 in His Church, and branded them as heretics, while 
 they suppressed the testimony of their teaching. 
 Their cry was still, Save what remains of society, 
 what remains of civilization, what remains of 
 moral and religious culture. Make friends with 
 the votaries even of the worser creeds. Close your 
 ranks, all ye peoples, shoulder to shoulder, to keep 
 off at least the barbarians who will root out the 
 faith of us all. Enough for the day is the evil 
 thereof! — Such, I imagine, was the hysterical cry 
 which went forth from the multitude, half Christian 
 half Pagan, who met together in those unhappy 
 days to confuse the Feast of the Nativity with the 
 Feast of the Saturnalia, the Feast of the Pm^ifi- 
 cation with the Feast of the Lupercalia, the Feast of 
 
S^. Leo the Great. 159 
 
 Rogations with the Feast of the Ambarvalia ; to in- 
 stal saints and martyrs in the temples of demi-gods ; 
 to place the long-cherished shrines of Ceres, Minerva, 
 even of Venus, under the invocation of the Mother of 
 Jesus. Such was the compromise now unconsciously 
 effected between the Old world and the New ; such 
 the unhappy influence of ideas and fancies which had 
 survived a positive conviction. 
 
 Paganism was assimilated, not extirpated, and 
 Christendom has suffered from it more or less ever 
 since ; but she had brighter days at hand already : 
 and if you will indulge me with listening to another 
 lecture, I hope at our next meeting to open to you 
 a more cheerful stage in her progress. 
 
LECTUEE IV. 
 
 ST. GKEaORY AND THE EARLY MISSIONS OF 
 THE CHURCH. 
 
 In my last lecture I drew a sketch of the Church 
 in the fifth century, in which I represented it as 
 shrinking from its office as the converter of the 
 nations, and confining itself ignobly to the main- 
 tenance of the remnant of social and spiritual culture 
 which had thus far survived the attacks of the bar- 
 barian and the decline of the ancient civilization. 
 With this special object before it, I pourtrayed it 
 as content to make terms with what survived of 
 Paganism, content to lose even more than it gained 
 in an unholy alliance with superstition and idolatry ; 
 enticing, no/ doubt, many of the vulgar, and some 
 even of the more intelligent, to a nominal acceptance 
 of the Christian Faith, but conniving at the sm*- 
 render by the great mass of its own baptized members 
 of the highest and purest of their spiritual acquisi- 
 tions. I seemed to trace this unhappy compliance 
 
vSV. Gregory. i6t 
 
 to a fond but recreant hope of averting the utter 
 ruin of all religion under the assaults of the northern 
 barbarians, whose advancing tribes threatened to be 
 even fiercer and more exterminating than those who 
 had come before them. The Huns, it was feared, 
 would be more terrible than the Groths ; the Avars 
 and the Lombards loomed in the distance, not less 
 terrible than the Huns. Meanwhile the great Leo, 
 as the founder of the Roman Papacy, had exercised 
 the talents of a profound statesman, in ordering and 
 training the Church as a spiritual militia for the 
 defence of social order. He had created a new 
 Roman people, with a sense of brotherhood and 
 mutual sympathy akin to the ancient patriotism ; 
 by collecting the Church into his own hands he had 
 consolidated its powers of resistance, and imbued it 
 with a certain pride and confidence in itself and in 
 its leader, which constituted it already a strong ma- 
 terial force for the government of the world around 
 it. While the Church of the fifth century, in mj- 
 view, grievously betrayed its trust in one direction, I 
 do not the less clearly see how much it improved the 
 talent committed to its use in another. 
 
 It was the work of Providence ; and the designs 
 of the great Governor of the Church, condescending 
 
 M 
 
1 62 S^. Gregory. 
 
 to human infirmity in its common admixture of 
 good with evil, seem to admit of being reverentially 
 traced in proceeding, as I would now invite you to 
 proceed, further. 
 
 I have spoken broadly of the age of Leo as the 
 fifth century, for convenience' sake ; but it will be 
 well to remind you that the actual work and direct 
 influence of the great Pontiff are confined properly 
 to the middle period of that century only. In 451 
 he repulsed Attila, but in 458 Eome was actually 
 taken and sacked by the Vandals under Grenseric, 
 whom Leo could only soothe and propitiate. Leo 
 himself died in 461 ; and Eome was a third time 
 taken, by the German Eicimer, ten years later. 
 With the fall of Augustulus and the establishment 
 of a barbarian kingdom by Odoacer in 476, the 
 Eoman Empire in the West was finally dissolved ; 
 the throne, which had been at least nominally re- 
 served for an Emperor of Eoman blood, was now 
 for the first time occupied by a barbarian and a 
 stranger under the alien title of a hing-^ the con- 
 stitution of civil society was surrendered bodily to 
 the northern conquerors, barbarians themselves or 
 at best the children of barbarians. Pagans themselves 
 or the children of Pagans, who had acquired little 
 
S^. Gregory. 16 
 
 more than the outward varnish of southern culture, 
 and of the religion which now represented it. We 
 may regard the old classical Paganism as, to the 
 outward eye, almost utterly extinguished, while we 
 bear in mind that the spirit of the old traditions had 
 become to a great extent merged in the popular 
 Christianity, and actually assimilated to it. 
 
 For myself, I cannot but think that vital Chris- 
 tianity, spiritual Christianity, the sense of sin and 
 of the appointed means of recovery from sin, had 
 become cold and numb, all but dead, at this critical 
 period throughout the Church. We can only speak 
 of the Church as we read of it in the mass ; Grod 
 knows who are His own, and He sees, no doubt, at 
 all times the many or the few who are believers in 
 heart and soul, however little they may make them- 
 selves visible to the world at large. There was in- 
 deed one spark of common life in the Church which 
 showed itself conspicuously enough even at this un- 
 happy period, and no doubt worked its appointed 
 way in the destined development of the Faith. The 
 fifth century was eminently active in the convening 
 of ecclesiastical Synods for the definition of doctrine. 
 During its course many dogmatic points of interest 
 and importance were finally determined by the com- 
 
 M 2 
 
164 S/. Gregory. 
 
 mon voice of Christendom. The age of the great 
 Trinitarian controversy was fitly succeeded by the 
 age of the Monophysite and the Monothelite. The 
 doctrine of the unity of the Divine substance in the 
 Father and the Son was completed by the judgments 
 which affirmed the unity of the Divine nature and 
 the unity of the Divine will. These and other 
 questions had doubtless demanded a final solution, 
 to bring Christians to a common understanding in 
 regard to them. To the fifth century we owe the 
 determination of these points ; and we acknowledge 
 with thankfulness that the fifth century, with all 
 its shortcomings, did retain the spark of life which 
 has imparted a substantial power to its dogmatic 
 decisions. We may regret indeed that this spark of life 
 was also manifested in its repression of such practical 
 reformers as an Aerius, a Jovinian, a Vigilantius 
 may probably have been, and in the honour lavished 
 upon its own impetuous and overbearing champions. 
 We may bear not without some impatience the signs 
 of ecclesiastical vigour which we recognise in the 
 silence imposed upon Vigilantius, and the canoni- 
 zation of his opponent Jerome. 
 
 But if the Church might seem throughout the 
 fifth century to lie almost dormant under the bonds 
 
SL Gregory. 165 
 
 of its spiritual winter, the outburst of a new spring- 
 tide of active and fertile growth was being prepared 
 for it in silence. The germ of this renovated vigour 
 was planted in the Monastic and Cenobitic systems, 
 which took such deep root in the fourth and were 
 not wholly unknown in the third century. You will 
 distinguish between the monastic or recluse life of 
 the anchorite or hermit — who fled from the world 
 to devote himself in entire seclusion to communion 
 with Grod and Him only — and the cenobitic, the 
 conventual or common life of a number of individuals 
 living together indeed, but separate from the outer 
 world. We can easily understand and appreciate 
 the motives which first drove men of warm and 
 tender feelings to renounce the society of the harsh, 
 the selfish, the brutish, who in an age of rude cor- 
 ruption surrounded and harassed them. The Church 
 was compassed in on every side by external perils 
 from the violence of man ; she was distressed and 
 her action everywhere impeded by the perils en- 
 gendered by sin everywhere abounding. It was an 
 age well fitted to breed enthusiasts and visionaries, 
 and it did breed them on every side, not less among 
 the Pagans than the Christians. Julian was not less 
 a fanatic than Jerome. Reverse the position of the 
 
1 66 S^. Gi^egory. 
 
 two men, both great men in their way, and ' the same 
 adust complexion ' would have made a hermit of 
 the Emperor, a tyrant — perhaps a blasphemer — 
 of the Saint. The priests and mystagogues of Isis 
 and Mithras were visionaries essentially of the same 
 type as a Saint Anthony and a Symeon of the Pillar. 
 The vulgar marvels of our modern spiritualism and 
 clairvoyance, as it is called, are simply a repro- 
 duction of the pretensions of the heathen wonder- 
 workers, and can be paralleled riddle for riddle by 
 them.^ The precipitation with which the Christians 
 of the same age — and, alas ! alas ! Augustine among 
 the rest — accepted every tale of miracle and vision 
 that was palmed upon them, shows how widely spread 
 was the credulity of the age, how the perils and trials 
 
 ' ' Magicians and wizards, chiefly natives of Egypt .... 
 pretended to expel demons from the possessed, to blow diseases 
 away, to summon the souls of heroes, and make tables appear 
 spread with sumptuous repasts, and figures of animals move as 
 animated .... Magician philosophers had their mysteries, 
 into which their pujDils were initiated step by step, till they 
 reached the contemplation of the gods manifesting themselves 
 in a variety of forms, chiefly human, but not unfrequently too 
 in formless liglit only. Probably this did not mean a mere 
 scenic phantasmagoria, but an artificial state akin to magnetic 
 clairvoyance, in which people found themselves surrounded 
 with light, like that of the Byzantine navel- inspectors of the 
 fourth century.' — DoUinger {Gentile and JeiVj ii. 214), from 
 Proclus, Celsus, and other ancient authorities. 
 
St Gregory. 167 
 
 to which it was subjected had overwrought its brain 
 and weakened its nerves.^ 
 
 ' St. Augustine, in his belief in dreams and visions (^Civ. Dei^ 
 xxii, 8), reminds us curiously of Wesley. The fallacies of human 
 credulity at this period are exposed by DoUinger {G. and J. 
 ii. 199 foil.) :— 
 
 ' We are acquainted with a few of the numerous expedients 
 most frequently employed in making gods, demons, and the 
 dead, who had to be conjured up, appear. The believer was bid 
 to look into a stone basin filled with water, which had a glass 
 bottom, and stood over an opening in the floor. The imaginary 
 god was found below, or a figure was traced on the wall, which 
 was smeared over with a combustible composition. During the 
 evocatio a lamp was imperceptibly brought close to the wall, so 
 as to set fire to the material, and a fiery demon exhibited to the 
 astonished believers. The apparition of Hecate was specially 
 efficacious. Believers were told to throw themselves prostrate 
 at the first sight of fire. The goddess of the crossways and 
 roads, the Gorgo or Mormo wandering among the graves at 
 night, was then invoked in verse, after which a heron or vulture 
 was let loose, with lighted tow attached to the feet, the flame 
 of which, frightening the bird, it flew wildly about the room. 
 .... Similar artifices were employed to make the moon and 
 stars appear on the ceiling of a room, and to produce the effects 
 of an earthquake. To make an inscription show itself on the 
 liver of a victim, the haruspex wrote the words previously with 
 sympathetic ink on the palm of his hand, which he kept pressed 
 on the liver long enough to leave the impression. So the Neo- 
 Platonists contrived to cheat the Emperor Julian, and Maximus 
 caused him to see an apparition of fire in the temple of Hecate. 
 .... The ' Pneumatica ' of Heron abound in this kind of lore. 
 Here you have instructions how to build a temple so that, on 
 the kindling of the fire on the altar, the doors open spontaneously 
 .... by lighting a fire on an altar to contrive that two figures 
 at the side should pour a libation upon it,' &c. &;c. To these 
 
J 68 S^. Gregory. 
 
 The delusions of the Anchorites are notorious, 
 and are generally acknowledged by candid writers 
 even of the Medieval or Eomish schools. Grreat 
 excuse may be alleged for the devotees who at such 
 a season of general misery — with such imminent 
 prospects of worse evils of all kinds, with such fer- 
 vent aspirations for their Lord's second coming, and 
 assurance that He could not long delay it — aban- 
 doned the world and all its duties to secure, as they 
 imagined, their own souls' safety. But it was a 
 selfish policy at best ; and I hardly suppose that any 
 one, on calmly reviewing it, can think that Christian 
 society gained anything by the countenance it lent 
 to it. The best that can be said for it is, that it left 
 here and there an example of fortitude and self- 
 control, to show mankind the real strength of human 
 nature. It might encourage wiser men to a wiser 
 application of the deep resources of love and zeal with 
 which Gfod has endowed His creatures, if they have 
 but the sense to employ them rightly. But the case 
 of the Cenobites, of the devotees who retired from 
 
 and kindred artifices, adds the writer (with a glance at our 
 animal magnetism or so-called spiritualism), there is a great 
 deal that is similar even among the phenomena of more modern 
 times. 
 
S^. Gregory. 169 
 
 life in public to seek Grod in a private community 
 — cultivating some sympathy with their fellows, 
 cherishing principles of discipline and obedience, 
 occupying themselves with labour both of mind and 
 body, studying, digging, writing, preaching — the 
 case of the Cenobites was very different. We may 
 deplore their precipitation in quitting the world, and 
 the common ties of society which good men might 
 do so much to leaven ; we may discredit the super- 
 stitious mortifications which they imposed on them- 
 selves ; we may think that the rules of celibacy, of 
 poverty, even of mendicancy, which they enforced, 
 were more adapted to foster self-exaltation than self- 
 abasement; wa may trace in the repeated failure and 
 decline of the efforts so repeatedly made to reform 
 and reinforce their system, the inevitable law by 
 which an unnatural mode of existence is doomed to 
 decay and perish, and never lives out half its years ; 
 but we may acknowledge that the common or con- 
 ventual life became a powerful instrument in the 
 hands of Divine wisdom for working out in its due 
 season a happy transformation in the position of the 
 Church. 
 
 The effect of the conventual system was to im- 
 plant in the minds of Churchmen a new and signi- 
 
1 yo SL Gregory. 
 
 ficant sense of their duty, as the apostles or mis- 
 sionaries of the Lord Jesus. We have marked the 
 fifth century as a period of despair and languor 
 throughout the Christian community, when the idea 
 of advancing the bounds of Christianity, once so rife 
 and effectual, was tacitly abandoned. For the supine- 
 ness in this particular of the Church under Leo some 
 pleas may, no doubt, be urged. First of these 
 perhaps was the imminent danger to the Faith at 
 Eome itself, if the barbarians, who had already 
 entered within the bounds of the Empire and hovered 
 over Italy, should be allowed to become its masters 
 without being first caught in the net of the Grospel. 
 While this portentous issue was yet undecided, the 
 preachers of Christianity, it may be said, could not 
 afford to go further afield in search of more remote 
 barbarians to convert. Leo himself, it may be 
 added, was too fully occupied with the consolidation 
 of Church authority according to his own engrossing 
 ideas, to extend his views and multiply his anxieties 
 elsewhere. But there is assuredly something singular 
 in his apparent blindness to the future prospects 
 of the Church of Christ, which lives, according to 
 Christ's own words, by a process of constant exten- 
 sion. Leo wrote a treatise on the ' Calling of all 
 
S^. Gregory. 171 
 
 Nations.' He was fully impressed with the truth of 
 the divine declaration, that ' Grod willed that all 
 men should be saved.' He assures us that the 
 Church, in performance of her bounden duty, ' prays 
 to Grod everywhere not only for the Saints and the 
 regenerate in Christ, but also for all unbelievers and 
 enemies of the Cross of Christ, for all worshippers of 
 idols, for Jews, heretics, and schismatics.' It prays 
 that they may be converted to God, accept the Faith, 
 and become delivered from the darkness of ignorance. 
 The Church in his view is bound to pray that the 
 nations may come to Christ, but he says not a word 
 of the Church going to them, calling to them, and 
 bringing them. As the nations come to Eome, he 
 seems to say, so let them come of their own will to 
 Grod. He prays that they may do so ; but as Eome 
 has ceased to go forth and subdue the nations to her 
 sway, so it seems not to occur to him that the Church 
 should go forth, and conquer the children of unbelief 
 in their own lands. As the Partbians, the Modes, 
 and the Elamites ' flowed together ' to receive the 
 saving truth from the Apostles, so he would invite 
 the Groths, and Grermans, and Scythians to accept 
 the faith from Rome, and let it bear fruit in their 
 own homes hereafter as Grod pleases. His whole 
 
172 St Gregory. 
 
 treatise on the calling of the Gentiles is devoted to 
 explaining and elaborating the doctrine of Grace 
 and Freewill, and showing how the scheme of 
 Eedemption which he has founded upon the teach- 
 ing of Augustine may be reconciled with the will of 
 God that all men should be saved. But on the 
 overthrow of the Western Empire, and the demon- 
 stration, rendered manifest to all, that with the 
 complete triumph of the new world of secular po- 
 lities a new spiritual development, a new phase of 
 Divine guidance, was opening, the conscience of the 
 believers was aroused to a sense of the sinfulness of 
 their cowardly inactivity. * Go ye into all nations, 
 and baptize them,' had been the last words of their 
 blessed Master. How long had they cowered behind 
 the outworks of a narrow civilization, and refused 
 even to stretch forth a hand to the unnumbered 
 multitudes beyond it ! How long had they shrunk 
 in fear and horror from contact with the mass of 
 their fellow-creatures, all gifted with immortal souls, 
 all subjects of the same law of love which Christ had 
 imposed on His disciples as His greatest command- 
 ment! Thereupon a new spirit seemed suddenly 
 to awaken among them — the missionary spirit ; a 
 new spirit, we may at this period justly call it, for 
 
6V. Gregory. 1 7; 
 
 the original impulse which had urged the first 
 Christians over land and sea in quest of proselytes, 
 had been checked or paralysed among the believers 
 for two or more centuries. It is to this new or 
 revived missionary spirit which distinguished the 
 sixth century, of which I would place Pope Grregory 
 the First, or the Great, as the central figure, that I 
 desire now to introduce you. Kemember that the 
 Empire, which had represented the unity of man- 
 kind, had become disintegrated and broken into frag- 
 ments. Men were no longer Eomans, but Groths and 
 Sueves, Burgundians and Vandals, and beyond them 
 Huns, Avars, Franks, and Lombards, some with a 
 slight tincture of Christian teaching, but most with 
 none ; but were they not all God's children, all alike 
 bound in sin ? Had not Christ died for all ? Let 
 but the Gospel be proclaimed to all, and leave 
 the issue in God's hands ! Such was the contrast 
 between the age of Leo and the age of Gregory ! 
 between the era of despair in the Church, of narrow 
 views and faint aspirations, and the era of hopeful- 
 ness, activity, and vigom- ! It was as when the 
 prison doors were opened and Peter came forth 
 into the streets. 
 
 Few men have done so great a work in the world 
 
174 '^^- G'^^gory. 
 
 as Benedict of Nursia, the founder of the convent of 
 mount Cassino, the founder of the Benedictine order 
 of monks, which from the first took the largest 
 share in breeding apostles for the G-entiles, and 
 fostering the spirit of apostolic activity. But the 
 impulse of which I have spoken may be traced more 
 particularly to the career of Severinus, the apostle, 
 as he is called, of Bavaria. The origin and birthplace 
 of this holy preacher, the first of the medieval mis- 
 sionaries, is not precisely known. He is supposed to 
 have come from the East, and we are allowed to 
 believe that he had been an inmate of some convent 
 in Asia, where his mind had first opened to the 
 claims of the distant heathens to his devout solicitude. 
 With a bold and vigorous effort he threw aside the 
 contemplative life to which he had originally sur- 
 rendered himself. His love for others prevailed 
 over his love for himself; perhaps, if his heart was 
 still more keenly touched, he might feel that 
 Christian love is twice blest ; it blesseth him that 
 gives as well as him that takes of it. So it was that 
 Severinus engaged himself throughout a mission of 
 thirty years in the work of converting the barbarians 
 on the Danube, the Save, and the Iser ; barbarians 
 most of whom had never heard the name of Christ 
 
Si. Gregory. 175 
 
 of whom a few only had imbibed at best some corrupt 
 and imperfect notions of His message of Love and 
 Peace ; barbarians as rude and restless as any that 
 had hitherto scared mankind from their propriety, 
 but on whose simple hearts he exercised a soothing- 
 influence, attested by its permanent effects as well 
 as by the recorded incidents of his story. He suc- 
 ceeded in bringing many of their chiefs to baptism ; 
 he effected the liberation of multitudes of captives, the 
 preservation of some cities ; he attached to himself 
 a body of zealous assistants, and planted them in 
 divers localities. It is affirmed of Severinus that 
 he actually founded several Episcopal sees which 
 remained as centres of Christian enlightenment for 
 ages. The chronicles indeed from which we learn of 
 his doings teem unfortunately with the relation of 
 supposititious miracles, those parasites of the ancient 
 missionary church; but for this wretched under- 
 growth the holy man is in nowise accountable, and 
 few men, as it would seem, could have better 
 deserved, without any aid from them, the title 
 he has received of Saint or Holy, and Apostolus or 
 Missionary. 
 
 But the end of the fifth century witnessed 
 another act of vigour on the part of the Church on a 
 
176 S^, G^^egory 
 
 much larger scale, and pregnant with far more 
 critical consequences. No incident perhaps is 
 more important in the development of the Roman 
 See and the Eomish Church, with all its mingled 
 tissue of good and evil stretching through so many 
 centuries, than that of the conversion of Clovis and 
 the Franks, the conquerors of ancient Graul, the 
 founders of modern France. The mission of Severi- 
 nus had been done comparatively in a corner ; it was 
 the obscure work of an obscure individual; it had 
 not sprung from the common impulse of the Church, 
 nor at the motion of a pope, a bishop, or a council. 
 It was a private experiment on the power of the 
 Gospel, and the receptivity of the natural conscience 
 of man. The same and no more might be said of 
 other individual efforts on a similar scale which are 
 recorded about the same time. But the example 
 once set was sure to be followed and pushed to 
 greater results. The conversion of Clovis and the 
 Franks is, I suppose, the earliest instance of a 
 Christian mission carried out on a national scale by 
 the common action of the Church represented by the 
 Pope and See of Rome. It becomes accordingly a 
 great historical event, deserving the earnest con- 
 sideration not of Churchmen only, but of all political 
 
SL Gregory. 177 
 
 enquirers. The facts which solicit our attention in 
 regard to it lie, however, within a small compass ; 
 and we may be satisfied on the present occasion with 
 a rapid glance at them, before we pass on to the 
 story of yet another conversion, more interesting to 
 ourselves as Englishmen, and not less so perhaps to 
 all who are interested in the history of human 
 progress. 
 
 Clovis and the Franks who burst the barrier of 
 the Khine at the end of the fifth century were 
 simply heathens, nominally addicted to the worship 
 of the Teutonic deities Thor and Woden, but in 
 reality enslaved by the still grosser superstition of 
 omens, sortilege, and magic. They were rude as the 
 rudest of the northern hordes which had followed in 
 succession, breaking wave after wave upon the feeble 
 dykes opposed to them by the southern civilization : 
 which had one after another overflowed or beaten 
 down these outer bulwarks, but which, when once 
 established within them, had adopted a more or less 
 settled polity. They had received some amount of 
 material culture, and had made generally an outward 
 profession of the spiritual belief of the conquered 
 people. So it had been with the Visigoths, with 
 the Vandals, with the Burgundians, all terrible names 
 
 N 
 
178 SL G^'egory. 
 
 in their day as destroyers of the churches and slayers 
 of the Saints, but all in turn humanized in some 
 degree by contact with a higher order of society. 
 ' Ecclesia capta ferum victorem cepit.' The Church 
 might boast that she had conquered her conquerors. 
 Sanguine men might hope for their further advance 
 in humanity and religion. Yet the Church, though 
 more hopeful than of yore, though warming with a 
 spirit more generous than that of i\i^ arrogant Leo, 
 and assuming courage to face the unexplored future 
 of mankind, might still have shrunk from the dread 
 encounter with the untamed barbarians who were 
 now filling the Graulish provinces with terror. It 
 was ordained that a special way should be opened 
 for her. The first step, the leading step which so 
 often decides an eventful crisis, was the impulse, — 
 casual it might seem to the bystanders, providen- 
 tial, as we who trace it by the light of after his- 
 tory must reverently allow — the providential impulse 
 which induced Clotilda, the wife of Clovis, to extort 
 her husband's permission for the baptism of their 
 first-born. Fruitful as the influence of women has 
 been in promoting the acceptance of the Faith by 
 unbelieving husbands and sons, in later times, this is 
 perhaps the first recorded instance, certainly the first 
 
SL Gregory. 179 
 
 conspicuous and important one, in which they that 
 obey not the Word have been won by the conversation 
 of wives or mothers. Clotilda was the daughter of the 
 king of the Burgundians, and the Frankish con- 
 queror had taken her in marriage as a matter of 
 policy ; for the Burgundians, themselves a Teutonic 
 people, had settled as conquerors before him in the 
 south of Gaul, and were in a position to do him 
 good service as allies in the complete subjugation 
 of the north. The Burgundians, along with the 
 other Teutonic invaders, had already accepted the 
 name at least of Christians ; but while the Visigoths, 
 the Vandals, and others had generally adopted the 
 Arian interpretation, the Burgundians seem alone 
 to have fallen under the guidance of orthodox 
 teachers, and had obtained the favour and confidence 
 more especially of the Church of Eome. An 
 orthodox princess had now ascended the throne of 
 the most formidable of the barbarian invaders. 
 Popes, bishops, monks, and laymen generally might 
 unite their prayers for the glorious results which the 
 Head of the Church in heaven should bring to pass 
 in consequence. The presumptive heir of Clovis 
 was baptized by the hands of an orthodox prelate, 
 the friend, the ally, the subservient minister of the- 
 N 2 
 
i8o SL Gregory. 
 
 head of the Church upon earth. This was a greater 
 triumph for the Church than the baptism even of 
 Constantino, whose orthodoxy had been impeached 
 from the beginning. Alas! the infant child of so 
 many hopes died. Behold, a greater triumph still ! 
 Clovis, ferocious to his foes, was sensitive, tender, 
 loving, to his wife. A second son was born, and a 
 second time Clovis, Pagan though he was, yielded to 
 a woman's entreaties, and allowed the Christian rite 
 to be administered. This second child grew up, 
 to the great public advancement, no doubt, of the 
 Catholic Faith, though with little credit to its 
 practical teaching; so mingled has ever been the 
 yarn of good and evil in the operations of Grod's 
 Church upon earth, so chequered the inter-working 
 of the Divine Spirit with the carnal affections of 
 sinful men. 
 
 But Clovis was still a Pagan. His destined con- 
 version followed suddenly and unexpectedly. It 
 was in the crisis of the great fight of Tolbiac that 
 the uxorious husband remembered his wife, her love, 
 her faith, and yearned for more spiritual communion 
 with her. 'Jesus Christ,' he cried, ' Thou whom my 
 Clotilda declares to be the Son of the living Grod, a 
 present help to them that are in need, the Griver of 
 
S^. Gregory. i8i 
 
 victory to them that believe in Thee, I implore Thy 
 gracious aid ! I have called on my own gods, but 
 they are far away, and do not hear me ; therefore, I 
 believe not that such gods have power to help me.' 
 Such is the record of our monkish historians. 
 Victory followed ; Clovis fulfilled his vows ; and not 
 himself alone, but many thousands of his trusty 
 followers pressed forward to accept initiation into 
 the Christian Faith. Eemigius or St. Eemi, Bishop 
 of Kheims, undertook to impart to him the necessary 
 instruction. Seeking him one evening, when he 
 had retired with his queen from the banquet of the 
 day, he concluded his admonitions with the promise 
 that the Christian posterity of that blessed pair 
 should continue to reign gloriously, should inherit 
 the throne of the Eoman Empire, should exalt to the 
 utmost the dignity of Holy Church. The kings of 
 France, with the eighteen Clovis or Louis-es who, 
 are numbered among them, have striven through 
 so many ages to give effect to the auspicious promise ; 
 the prophecy has helped perhaps to the furtherance 
 of its own fulfilment. Kings of France and Emperors 
 of the French have still proudly called themselves 
 the Eldest Sons of the Church, and devoted them- 
 selves even to the political interest of the Eoman 
 
i82 S^. Gregory. 
 
 See, which they identify exclusively therewith. For 
 the sake of that Church, and at its bidding, they 
 have allowed themselves to do many acts of unchris- 
 tian wickedness. They have stifled the Eeforma- 
 tion, they have massacred the Reformers ; but in the 
 Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, their charter of 
 toleration, their own sin has found them out. From 
 that generation to the present the Church of which 
 they make themselves the champions has lost, more 
 conspicuously than any other Church of the Roman 
 obedience, all command over the human intellect. I 
 do not think that she has produced, since the time 
 of Fenelon, whom she proscribed, a single divine 
 who has attained the second, or even the third 
 rate in the long and varied list of Christian spiritual 
 teachers, and the claims she still advances to in- 
 telligent consideration, questionable as they were 
 even in the days of a Bossuet and a Massillon, have 
 become absurd in the eyes of the existing genera- 
 tion. 
 
 Another story is that the teaching of Clovis was 
 interrupted by his exclaiming with his hand on his 
 sword, when he heard the piteous accounts of our 
 Lord's sufferings, ' Would to God I had been there 
 with my warlike Franks to defend Him.' And here 
 
SL Gregory. 183 
 
 we may recognise perhaps a savour of the martial 
 ardour which has so conspicuously animated the 
 Grallican Church, its champions and defenders, 
 throughout succeeding ages. Such was the spirit 
 which placed France at the head of the Crusades, 
 the spirit which nerved the arms of Grodfrey and 
 Lusignan, and more than all of the sainted, and I 
 would willingly say, the saintly Louis ; the spirit which 
 created the orders of Knights Templars and Knights 
 Hospitallers, the two military orders which the 
 French Church has contributed to the rolls of monkery ; 
 the spirit which has broken out even in these in- 
 auspicious days, which has more than once almost 
 set Europe in a blaze in pretended defence of the 
 Holy Sepulchre, and has sent the brave general 
 Lamoriciere to incur his first and last defeat in the 
 worthless cause of the Pope's temporal sovereignty. 
 Such was the long career of the French Church, 
 which was inaugurated on the solemn occasion when 
 Clovis and his Franks received Holy Baptism at the 
 font of the Cathedral of Kheims. We must put 
 away from us indeed the image of the great medie- 
 val edifice, which now raises its imposing fapade, 
 to admit the kings of France, when kings she has, to 
 their solemn consecration ; yet we may believe that. 
 
184 S/. Gregory. 
 
 even in the fifth century, the mother Church of Graul 
 was eminent in size and beauty above most others ; 
 and we may picture to ourselves a scene of sublime 
 magnificence when, as we read, the pavement before 
 its portals was shaded by many folds of embroidered 
 drapery suspended from surrounding roofs and 
 balconies ; when the area of the building was decked 
 with a long row of fonts for the reception of so 
 many expected converts ; when the floor was sprinkled 
 with perfumed waters ; when wax- tapers of odorous 
 scent sparkled — in spite of Jerome's protest a century 
 before — in the light of day on every side, and the 
 charmed imagination of the barbarians so tricked 
 their senses, that they deemed themselves rapt in the 
 sweets of paradise ! The chief of a tribe of stolid 
 ruffians descended into the baptismal basin ; three 
 thousand of his companions plunged boldly with him. 
 ' And now ' — to quote an ardent French historian — 
 ' when they arose from the waters as Christian 
 disciples, one might have seen fourteen centuries 
 of empire rising with them ; — the whole array of 
 chivalry, the long series of the Crusades, the deep 
 philosophy of the schools ; — in one word, all the 
 heroism, all the liberty, all the learning of the later 
 ages ! A great nation was commencing its career ; 
 
S^. Gregory. 185 
 
 that nation was the French.' ^ Pretty strong 
 language is that ; but let us pardon, on such an oc- 
 casion, the exaggeration of an enthusiastic patriot, and 
 an enthusiastic Catholic, a man blind perhaps of both 
 eyes ! Let me conclude, however, with one word in 
 favour of the good Eemigius — for such I believe he 
 was. It was not he that gave the impulse to a faith 
 so mingled with blood and iron as that of the French 
 Church in after ages. His teaching had tended only 
 to contrition and humility. ' Take the yoke upon 
 thee,' he had exclaimed, ' thou conquered savage ! 
 Kiss the cross thou hast erewhile burnt, burn the 
 idols thou hast hitherto adored ! ' 
 
 Such language might well betoken a message of 
 Peace and Groodwill towards men. It would be sad 
 to turn from it to the recital of the deeds of fraud 
 and violence by which the history of the converted 
 Franks is so shockingly disfigured. The descendants 
 of Clovis fell indeed, in one sense, upon evil times, 
 for their crimes were tracked by a pack of chroniclers 
 and minute historians, and very black they do cer- 
 tainly look in the light — more than commonly fierce 
 — which beats upon the throne of the Merovingian 
 monarchy. The Chilperics and Clotaires can hardly 
 ' Ozanam, Etudes Germaniques, ii. 54. 
 
S^. Gregory. 
 
 have been better than the nameless barbarians from 
 whom they derived their origin. Let us hope at least 
 that they were not worse — more superstitious, more 
 self-righteous ; that they were not misled to trust in 
 the vain promises of smiling priests and a corrupt 
 theology. Meanwhile, the Church of Eome took to 
 herself all the honour, and reaped much of the 
 advantage, of this signal national conversion. She 
 had encouraged and assisted the pious Clotilda in 
 winning her husband to the faith ; the prize thus 
 gained she did not carelessly forego. She baptized 
 him, as we have seen, with all the pomp and cere- 
 mony she had lately learnt to assume. She sur- 
 rounded him with a troop of ecclesiastics, a devoted 
 band who had all sworn direct allegiance to her, and 
 humbly accepted their functions from her hands. 
 For his special edification these flattering courtiers 
 applied the unction of the Jewish kings of old to 
 the consecration of the Christian monarchy ; a cere- 
 mony which might be more readily accepted by the 
 wondering neophyte, as it reminded him of the oil 
 or butter with which his Teutonic ancestor had been 
 wont to plaster his dishevelled locks — 
 
 Infundens acido comam biityro. 
 In the cathedral of Kheims the Church inaugurated 
 
S^. Gregory. 187 
 
 her first secular conquest, placing the State in sub- 
 ordination to herself, and plainly preparing the way 
 for the not far distant era when kings should wear 
 their crowns by sufferance of the Pope, and subjects 
 look to the Holy See for release from their temporal 
 obedience. All this and more was typified in the 
 unction of Clovis and Charlemagne and the long list 
 of their successors ; and the title with which they 
 were honoured of Most Christian has hardly, we 
 may think, compensated for the subservience it has 
 entailed upon them, nor for the base compliances it 
 has so often extorted from them. 
 
 Yet we must not forget that there is a brighter 
 side to the picture. We may feel at least some 
 assurance that the simple truths of the Gospel really 
 impressed themselves more or less deeply on the 
 minds of the general population ; that the Christian 
 lessons of penitence, resignation, and charity bore 
 genuine fruit among the classes from which so many 
 went forth to govern the Church at home as priests 
 and bishops, to evangelize the heathen abroad as 
 missionaries and martyrs. Even before the conver- 
 sion of the Franks, the indignant exclamation had 
 been heard — it had been heard from the mouth of 
 an Augustine, an Orosius, and a Salvian — that the 
 
S^. Gregory. 
 
 believing Eomans of the latter ages were more lost 
 and reprobate than many of the misbelievers around 
 them. ' You think,' says Salvian to his people, 
 ' that you are better than the barbarians ; they are 
 heretics, and you are orthodox. Yes, better are we 
 in our faith ; but in our lives — I say it with tears — we 
 are much worse. Treacherous are the Groths, but they 
 are shamefaced ; sensual are the Alans, but they 
 are faithful; the Franks are false of tongue, but 
 they are liberal and hospitable ; ' and so on with 
 others. ' And yet,' he continues, ' can we wonder 
 that Grod has given over our provinces to the bar- 
 barians, while their moderation serves to purify the 
 earth which still reeks with the debauches of the 
 Eomans ? ' ^ Whatever be the prejudice under which 
 these Christian satirists speak of their fellow-believers, 
 we may readily suppose that the fresh blood of the 
 new-comers teemed with elements of a higher faith 
 and a purer morality. We may imagine that the 
 Frankish converts were not unfitted to imbibe the 
 seeds of Christian cultivation from the lips of the 
 priests and monks who now undertook to instruct 
 them. The whole soil of PVance became rapidly 
 overshadowed witli cathedrals, churches, and monas- 
 ^ Salvian, Be Guhernativne Dcif lib. iv. 
 
6V. Gregory. 189 
 
 teries. France now constituted a province of Holy 
 Church, a dependency of the Holy See ; it was occu- 
 pied by an army of devout preachers and teachers ; 
 the missions poured into it by the Popes of the age 
 which followed gave it at least the outward semblance 
 of a kingdom of Christ, such as had hardly been seen 
 even under the government of the Emperor either 
 of the East or of the West. The success of the 
 Grospel missions of the ensuing century, the great 
 practical work of the Church of Eome, cannot 
 with candour be disguised or disparaged. 
 
 Much, no doubt, of this success must in fairness 
 be attributed to the organization and discipline 
 ui)der which the clergy, even of a distant province 
 such as France, were moved almost as puppets by 
 the guiding hand of the chief Bishop of the Western 
 Church enthroned in the Eternal City. Still more 
 must be ascribed to the veneration with which this 
 eminent prelate had inspired his subordinate clergy, 
 and through them the great body of an admiring 
 and imaginative laity. But the Chm-ch, it must be 
 remembered, of this later age had renounced none of 
 the corruptions of its predecessors, but had rather 
 enhanced them. The spirit of Paganism she had 
 imbibed had sunk like blood-poisoning into her 
 
I go S^. Gi^e^ory. 
 
 veins ; to a vicious generation even her vices recom- 
 mended her. How much of her success must be 
 imputed to the array of visions, miracles, and lying- 
 wonders with which she surrounded herself, partly, 
 no doubt, imagined, but too often deliberately in- 
 vented and falsified? The reputed history of the 
 ancient missions is in its details a tissue of super- 
 stitious narratives. We would not willingly suppose 
 that the brave and pious men who issued from the 
 cathedrals and convents of France to convert the 
 heathens beyond the Ehine, such as Saints Amandus 
 and Aloysius, Lupus, Nicetius, Arnulphus, and others 
 whose wanderings and preachings may still be traced, 
 — we would not willingly suppose that these Christian 
 heroes actually fabricated the marvellous stories 
 which illustrate the career of their class in the 
 pages of the monkish chroniclers. Often, at least, it 
 was not till one or more generations after their death 
 that they became thus famed for a power with heaven 
 to which they made no pretensions themselves, and 
 of which they were wholly unconscious. Nevertheless, 
 it was upon such fables that their repute has ulti- 
 mately rested ; their real virtues and graces, however 
 conspicuous, would have thrown no such nimbus of 
 <rlory around them as the childish hagiographers have 
 
S^. Gregory. 191 
 
 claimed and the Eoman Church has deliberately sanc- 
 tioned. The missions into Germany, with the foun- 
 dation of the great monastic institutions such as 
 Fulda, St. Gall, and Corbey, which upheld the 
 Church among the Pagans for so many centuries, 
 present to us from first to last a mixtuie of truth 
 and falsehood, of good and evil, such as runs, I fear, 
 more or less through the whole texture of poor human 
 nature. 
 
 Many touching and romantic stories might be 
 told, much sentiment and poetical imagery might be 
 lavished, in reference to the spiritual triumphs of 
 these Frankish missionaries, and still more perhaps 
 of the Irish missionaries, beyond the Ehine, who have 
 made this period so illustrious in the history of the 
 Western Church. Are they not written with every 
 advantage of rhetoric and word-painting in the books 
 of Montalembert on the Monks of the West ? — a 
 record, I would say, of illusions against which any 
 vigorous and manly mind needs hardly to be 
 guarded. But I hasten to the great central mission 
 of the sixth century, which makes the name of the 
 first Pope Gregory, surnamed the Great, especially 
 illustrious. I have pointed to this Pontiff as the 
 representative of the period before us, and mainly so 
 
192 6"/. Gregory. 
 
 because to him we owe the famous Mission of 
 Augustine to the Saxons in England — to us the most 
 interesting, if not actually the most striking, event 
 of ancient Christian history. To this most important 
 and fruitful crisis of the Church I would now call for 
 a short time your special attention. 
 
 The Mission of Augustine was perhaps more 
 distinctly than any other the direct work of the 
 Eoman See. It was distinctly the work of Grregory, 
 as the Head of the Eoman See. To his direct 
 initiative the picturesque and possibly the true 
 legend, so famous in his history, especially points. 
 You all know it, but you will allow me to vary the 
 broader lines of my narrative by repeating the par- 
 ticulars. 
 
 About the year 580, in the pontificate of Pelagius, 
 G-regory occupied the rank of a deacon among the 
 Eoman clergy. He was early noted for his zeal and 
 piety ; coming into large possessions, as an offshoot 
 of an ancient and noble family, he had expended his 
 wealth in the foundation of no less than seven 
 monasteries and had become himself tlie abbot of one 
 of them, St. Andrew's, at Eome. Devoted as he was 
 from the first to all the good works to which the 
 religious profession might best apply itself, his atten- 
 
S^. Gregory. 193 
 
 tion was more particularly turned to the cause of 
 Christian missions by casually remarking a troop of 
 young slaves exhibited for sale in the Eoman market. 
 Struck with the beauty or fresh complexion of these 
 strangers, he asked whether they were Christians or 
 Pagans. They were Pagans, it was replied. How 
 sad, he exclaimed, that such fair countenances should 
 lie under the power of demons. 'Whence came 
 they ? ' — ' From Anglia.' — ' Truly they are Angels. 
 A\Tiat is the name of their country ? ' — ' Deira.' — 
 ' Truly they are subject to the wrath of God : ira Dei. 
 And their king?' — 'Is named ^Ua.' — 'Let them learn 
 to sing Allelujah.' Britain had lately fallen under 
 the sway of the heathen Angles. Throughout the 
 eastern section of the island, the faith of Christ, 
 which had been established there from early times, 
 had been, it seems, utterly extirpated. The British 
 church of Lucius and Albanus still lingered, but was 
 chiefly confined within the ruder districts of Cornwall, 
 Wales, and Cumbria. The reported destruction of 
 the people with all their churches, and all their 
 culture, begun by the Picts q,nd Scots, and carried 
 on by the Angles and their kindred Saxons, had 
 made a profound impression upon Christendom. The 
 ' Groans of the Britons ' had terrified all mankind. 
 
194 '^^- Gregory. 
 
 and discouraged even the brave missionaries of Italy 
 and Graul. The ferocity of the reckless pirates, 
 the followers of Hengist and Horsa, had removed our 
 distant shores even farther from the sympathies of 
 southern Europe. None offered to go and preach to 
 the terrible idolaters. Grregory determined to make 
 the sacrifice himself. He prevailed on the Pope to 
 sanction his enterprise ; but the people of Rome, 
 with whom he was a favourite, interposed, and he 
 was constrained reluctantly to forego the peril and 
 the blessing. But the sight he had witnessed in the 
 market-place still retained its impression upon him. 
 He kept the fair-haired Angles ever in view ; and 
 when, in the year 592, he was himself elevated to 
 the popedom, he resolved to send a mission, and fling 
 upon the obscure shores of Britain the full beams of 
 the sun of Christendom, as they then seemed to 
 shine so conspicuously at Rome. 
 
 Augustine was the preacher chosen from among 
 the inmates of one of Grregory's monasteries, for the 
 arduous task thus imposed upon him. He was to 
 be accompanied by a select band of twelve monks, 
 together with a certain number of attendants. On 
 his passage through Gaul he was recommended to 
 the charitable offices of the Archbishop of Aries, 
 
S^. Gregory. 195 
 
 whose ecclesiastical position was the most eminent 
 in that country, and whose personal character and 
 experience were probably in high repute. The 
 missionaries required indeed all the encourage- 
 ment which the chief-pastor of the Church could 
 give them. They were seized, we are told, with 
 a sudden panic ; they paused and hesitated on their 
 way, and agreed at one moment to abandon the 
 undertaking if their master at Eome would consent 
 to it. They even sent Augustine back to lay their 
 entreaties before the holy Pontiff; but Grregory, 
 without even admitting their spokesman to his 
 presence, addressed them with a vigorous epistle ; and 
 his exhortations thus reinforced could only be re- 
 garded as commands. Augustine was promptly 
 designated to the government of the first See that 
 should be established among the Saxons. 
 
 Thus incited and fortified in spirit, the little band 
 reached the English shore. They landed on the isle 
 of Thanet, the usual place of debarkation from Bou- 
 logne or Witsand. Ethelbert, king of Kent, had 
 extended his dominion over the eastern coast of our 
 island as far as the Humber, and was at the time the 
 greatest of the Saxon potentates. His wife, named 
 Bertha, was a princess of the Frankish line. She 
 o 2 
 
196 kS/. Gregory. 
 
 was a Christian, and had obtained permission to 
 maintain a chapel for the administration of Christian 
 rites in the outskirts of the royal residence at Canter- 
 bury. The missionaries had provided themselves 
 with Frankish interpreters, and communication be- 
 tween these and Bertha's college of priests was easy. 
 Ethelbert was soon induced to meet the visitors in 
 the island on which they had landed. He com- 
 manded them to approach him in the open air, 
 for the pagan Saxons imagined that magical arts 
 could be more readily practised under a roof, which 
 they most dreaded on such occasions. Forward they 
 marched in solemn procession, bearing a silver cross 
 before them, with the image of the Saviour painted 
 on a board, singing a litany, and offering prayers for 
 themselves and for the heathens for whose welfare 
 they had come. Ethelbert bespoke them fair ; for 
 himself, he said, he was content with the usages of 
 his ancestors, but as they had journeyed so far and 
 braved such perils, he could not but suppose that 
 they were earnest and devoted to the cause they had 
 in hand, and he would not refuse them the exercise 
 of their religion, and the opportunity of preaching 
 it. He allowed them to settle themselves in his 
 capital ; the little church of St. Martin, just outside 
 
SL Gregory. ig'j 
 
 the city on the road from the coast, is said to mark 
 the spot on which Queen Bertha performed her 
 religious duties, and there it was that the new- 
 comers were at once piously received. In this place, 
 says our venerable Bede, ' they first began to meet, 
 to sing, to pray, to say mass, to preach, and to bap- 
 tize, till the King, having become a convert to the 
 Faith, allowed them to build or to repair churches in 
 all places/ 
 
 ' To build or repair churches,' says Bede. Are we 
 to infer from this that there were still many churches 
 of the ancient British Christians existing, though in 
 decay and ruin ? It would seem so ; and we may 
 surely read in these words an indication that the 
 original conversion of the Britons had been extensive, 
 if not universal. Perhaps we may infer further that 
 the old Christian tradition had not entirely perished 
 among the remnant of the Britons, who undoubtedly 
 still survived even throughout the country. The 
 King having thus quickly adopted the Faith presented 
 to him, the people as quickly followed his example. 
 The zeal, the devotion, the spiritual promises of the 
 missionary preachers produced a rapid effect, no less 
 than the many marvellous works which their hearers 
 imputed to them, and which, it would seem, they 
 
198 kS"/. Gregory. 
 
 were not slow to arrogate to themselves. When we 
 find Pope Grregory himself writing to Augustine, and 
 urging him, in the midst of his successes, not to 
 glory overmuch in the miracles which have attended 
 on his career, we cannot doubt that the Apostle, as 
 he was called, of England did actually advance such 
 pretensions to supernatural powers. He was swimming 
 indeed with the tide. The Saxons, king and people, 
 seem to have been all in his favour ; and he may 
 have been himself deluded by a triumph so easy and 
 so suddenly complete. Having thus made good his 
 footing on the soil of the heathens, Augustine re- 
 turned to France to receive consecration as Arch- 
 bishop of Canterbury at the hands of the Archbishop 
 of Aries. He proceeded to appoint Mellitus to the 
 See he created for London, and Justus to that of 
 Eochester, and thus were laid the foundations of the 
 Christian Hierarchy which the grace of God has 
 preserved to us even to this day. 
 
 There is something very remarkable in the faci- 
 lity with which the fierce idolaters, whose name had 
 struck such terror into the Christian nations far and 
 near, yielded to the persuasions of this band of peace- 
 ful evangelists. They yielded, no doubt, in some 
 degree to an extravagant apprehension of their 
 
St. Gregory. 199 
 
 supernatural powers ; partly also, as we would 
 readily believe, to the example of their holy lives, 
 and the earnestness of their preaching; still more, 
 perhaps, to the authority they asserted as instru- 
 ments of their far-distant sovereign in Italy, the in- 
 heritor, in barbarian eyes, of the Imperial power of 
 the Caesars, and of the order and discipline they 
 derived from him. Nowhere did the Eoman priests 
 put forward the claim of their local prelate more 
 prominently than in England; nowhere did their 
 disciples submit themselves more implicitly to the 
 foreign yoke which was thus thrust upon them. 
 Thus it was that this country became what it long 
 continued to be, the most devoted handmaid of the 
 Church of Kome. No people in fact has proved it- 
 self more sensitive, more sympathetic with spiritual 
 emotions than our Saxon ancestors ; no hagiology is 
 more replete with refined religious sentiment than 
 ours, as witnessed by the long list of female devotees 
 who have contributed to its array of reputed Saints 
 and Confessors. The story of the conversion of the 
 Northumbrians strikingly illustrates the imagin- 
 ative or poetical side of our national character, and 
 familiar as it is to most of us, may deserve to be once 
 more repeated. It has been well told by Southey 
 
200 SL Gregory. 
 
 and many others in prose, by Wordsworth in 
 verse ; but none, perhaps, has improved upon the 
 simple words of Bede, from whom we originally 
 derive it. 
 
 The missionary Paulinus was preaching to Edwin, 
 king of the heathens beyond the Humber. Edwin 
 had been already plied by the solicitations of his 
 wife, a converted princess of Kent ; he had been 
 solicited by letters from the Pope himself; he had 
 been assailed by signs and visions which he believed 
 to be specially vouchsafed him ; and he was already 
 more than half-persuaded to become himself a Chris- 
 tian. But a Saxon king was in many ways depen- 
 dent upon his council of nobles ; he was but the first 
 among a number of chiefs and warriors. In this 
 case, as in others of which we read in the history 
 of the Teutonic missions, it was deemed expedient 
 to debate in a public assembly the question of a 
 national conversion. ' Accordingly,' says our his- 
 torian, ' Edwin, holding a council of his wise men, 
 enquired of them, one by one, what they thought of 
 the new doctrine and worship. To which the chief 
 of his priests, Coifi, straightway replied, " king, 
 consider what this thing is wliich is now preached 
 unto us ; for I verily declare to you that the faith 
 
kSV. Gregory, 201 
 
 we have hitherto professed has, so far as I can learn, 
 no virtue in it at all. For none of your people has 
 set himself more diligently to serve our gods than I 
 have; and yet there are many who receive greater 
 favours from you, and are preferred before me. But 
 if these gods were good for anything, they would 
 rather set me forward, who have been ever so obser- 
 vant of them." ' Now this, it must be allowed, was 
 rather graceless in a prelate who occupied by Divine 
 permission the position of an Archbishop of York at 
 the court of the ancient Northumbria ; but so it was 
 that the archpriest Coifi was induced, by whatever 
 considerations, to advise that the new doctrine should 
 receive a respectful hearing. Thereupon uprose 
 another of the king's chief men, approving this 
 advice, and enforcing it with a picturesque illustra- 
 tion : ' The present life, king,' he said, ' seems to 
 me, compared with that time which is unknown to 
 us, like to the swift flight of a sparrow through the 
 room wherein you sit by the fire at supper in the 
 winter-tide, with your chiefs and ministers about 
 you, while the storms of wind and rain prevail 
 abroad. The sparrow, I say, flying in at one door 
 and immediately out at another, whilst he is within, 
 is safe from the wintry storm; but after a short 
 
202 SL Gregory. 
 
 space of fair weather he quickly vanishes out of our 
 sight into the cold and darkness without. Such is 
 the life of man, which is but for a moment ; of what 
 went before, and what shall follow it, we have no 
 knowledge. If, then, this new preaching can tell 
 us anything certain about it, let us by all means 
 hearken unto it, and presently adopt it.' By this 
 address, perhaps by both these addresses, the hearts 
 of the councillors were touched ; and after some 
 further parley — for the great resolve was not em- 
 braced without due consideration — it was determined 
 to accept the Christian faith, to overthrow the na- 
 tional idols, in which work Coifi came vigorously 
 forward, and to allow Paulinus to instal himself, 
 with a number of Christian priests around him, in 
 an episcopal see at York. There is a certain glow 
 of spiritual warmth about the conversion of the 
 Saxons in England, which we desiderate in that of 
 the Franks and other heathens on the continent ; 
 and the history of our Christian career, I would add, 
 has, with all its deficiencies, accorded mainly with 
 this happy beginning. 
 
 But this sketch of so interesting a passage in our 
 national history must not close without reference to 
 the one great blot by which it was at the outset 
 
S^. Gregory. 203 
 
 disfigured. We have marked more than once the 
 zeal of the missionaries. We have allowed liberal 
 excuse for their too common error in taking the 
 Church of Eome, the Church of the so-called Holy 
 See, for the Church of Christ universal. We are 
 willing to believe that their course was ordered for 
 the best, and that Divine providence, looking far 
 into the future, suffered the error of the day, for the 
 sake of the lasting advantage to the great cause, 
 from the outward unity thus impressed upon the 
 claims of Christendom in the face of her jealous 
 adversaries. Yet we cannot remark without a sigh 
 how manifestly some of the chief agents in this 
 conversion, and notably Pope Grregory himself, looked 
 more keenly to the promotion of ecclesiastical con- 
 formity than to the propagation of the genuine Grospel. 
 Keenly did he scent out the subtle distinctions of the 
 Arian and semi-Arian tenets, and devote himself to 
 reducing the Ostrogoths and the Lombards to the 
 strict orthodoxy of the Eoman See. But it was not 
 only in matters of belief that he was thus sternly criti- 
 cal. He was not less severe in requiring submission, in 
 matters of mere technical usage, to the discipline of 
 his own Church. There can be no doubt that his 
 zeal in the conversion of the Saxon heathens was 
 
204 ^^' Gregory. 
 
 quickened by anxiety to compel the remnant of the 
 ancient British Christians to conform, even in so 
 trivial a matter as the time of observing Easter, to 
 the rule of. Rome and of all Western Christendom. 
 The claims of the Holy See had advanced since the 
 time of Leo, and Pope Gregory did not scruple to 
 brand as heresy and spiritual rebellion any deviation 
 even in matters ceremonial from the lines marked 
 out by himself and his predecessors. Any difference, 
 however slight, was in itself a token of independence, 
 and no independence should any longer be tolerated. 
 The policy of the Roman See under Gregory no more 
 suffered the existence of a provincial or a national 
 Church, than the policy of the Empire under Augustus 
 or Trajan could endure the existence of a provincial 
 or a national commonwealth. God's providence has 
 sanctioned both the one and the other for special 
 times and purposes ; but both the one and the 
 other are essentially instruments of mere human 
 policy, to be broken and cast away when their time 
 has passed and their appointed purpose has been 
 effected. 
 
 The destruction of the ancient British Church 
 which followed is a dark page in the history of the 
 Saxon conversion. The British natives had fled in 
 
S/. Gregory. 205 
 
 great numbers into Wales, on the occupation of their 
 soil by the invaders ; they had carried with them 
 their religious organization ; their bishops seem to 
 have settled beyond the Severn, and abandoned all 
 the East to the heathens. Perhaps we must infer 
 from this that their Church had lost much of its 
 active life. Nevertheless, there were many bishops 
 and a multitude of monks still counted in its ranks. 
 The bishops met Augustine in conference at a spot 
 known afterwards by an oak, called by his name, on 
 the borders of their territory. They, met him to 
 discuss the questions of ritual, and they were van- 
 quished in the debate by a pretended miracle, against 
 which, of course, argument was powerless. Again 
 they met him before the great British monastery of 
 Bangor, in Flintshire. A hermit had directed them 
 to submit to Augustine, if he were a genuine man of 
 Grod; and this they should ascertain by observing 
 whether he rose with true Christian humility to 
 receive them. But Augustine stiffly kept his seat ; 
 it was resolved among them that he was a proud 
 and graceless impostor. This time he produced no 
 miracle, and to his arguments they smartly replied, 
 or refused to listen. The conference broke up; 
 Augustine departed with the threat that if they 
 
2o6 S^. Gregory. 
 
 would not have peace with their brethren, they 
 should have war with their enemies ; and surely 
 enougli the Saxons soon after attacked them, and 
 first destroyed twelve hundred monks who prayed 
 for their safety, and then the army which fought to 
 defend it. Thus, says the prior or venerable Bede, 
 was fulfilled the prediction of the holy bishop. Let 
 us hope that he did not aid himself in its accom- 
 plishment. The British Church reeled under the 
 blow, nor does it seem to have again made head in 
 Wales or elsewhere against the encroachments of the 
 foreign see. Perhaps we may trace the issue of this 
 unhappy conflict in the excess of Komish corruption 
 to which Ireland, and the excess of Protestant laxity 
 to which Wales, I fear, has been in these latter ages 
 abandoned. Yet we may remind ourselves that from 
 the descendants of these same Saxons, whom the 
 Roman monks converted, the blow was struck by 
 which the pretensions of Popery have been repressed 
 among us ; that it was by our Saxon kinsmen abroad, 
 the blood of whose fathers was shed for the Roman 
 See by Charlemagne, that spiritual freedom was 
 conquered on the continent ; the conversion of the 
 Saxons at home and abroad, once the guilty glory 
 of Rome, has issued in her deepest mortification. It 
 
S^. Gregory. 207 
 
 is from England and from northern Germany that 
 the Nemesis of Faith has fallen upon the wicked 
 power which has been so often drunk with the blood 
 of its opponents. 
 
 The great movement of revived life and vigour, 
 of revived hope and ambition, which appears in the 
 missions of the sixth century, continued to advance 
 through the ages which followed, but Upon this later 
 history I do not now intrude. The age of Columba, 
 of Grail and Boniface, rife with the conversion of 
 central Grermany, has many points of special interest. 
 The forcible reduction to the Faith of the Saxons by 
 Charlemagne presents an awful picture of another 
 kind. Sweden, Denmark, Iceland, and the North- 
 men have each their special chapter in the history of 
 Christian missions. The Roman Church of the sixth 
 century, and particularly Pope Grregory, who ruled it 
 during the latter years of that period, deserve the 
 credit of commencing, of urging, and of crowning 
 the great work. But the work of conversion, though 
 it has from time to time relaxed or declined, has 
 never wholly ceased since that ancient date. Christen- 
 dom, though amidst her perils and her dissensions 
 she has often fallen far short of the great ideal which 
 Grregory presented to her, has never altogether failed 
 
2o8 S^. Gregory. 
 
 in her bounden duty to go and teach all nations, 
 baptizing them, and teaching them to observe all 
 things whatsoever her Lord has commanded her. 
 And in so doing her Lord has always been with her, 
 as He promised her He would be. 
 
 Her Lord has been always with her ! What more 
 glorious and blessed token to the truth and efficacy 
 of the Christian dispensation than this, if indeed it 
 may be truly asserted of it ! True it is, that the 
 great efforts and the splendid results of the mission- 
 ary spirit of Grregory have hardly been repeated on 
 the same scale in later times. The opportunity has 
 perhaps passed. The buoyancy of ripened hope and 
 vigour which swayed the Church from the sixth 
 century may hardly revive perhaps a second time. 
 The ardent rage to avenge the triumphs of Mahomet 
 in the East by equal or greater conquests in the 
 West, to call into existence a new Christian world to 
 redress the balance of the old, may hardly recur in 
 the less excited times that have succeeded. The 
 choicest ground has been for the most part occupied. 
 The soil of the Teuton, extending over one half of 
 Europe, the most fertile seed-plot of intelligent 
 faith, has become, I trust, a possession of the Church 
 for ever ; but it has left no other such fruitful vine- 
 
SL Gregory. 209 
 
 yard to be seized and fenced and planted. The 
 human material on which a spiritual and truly 
 Christian culture can be successfully expended has 
 been, as some may think, more or less exhausted. 
 Doubtless, Providence will work out its purpose by 
 means beyond our scope of vision. Providence grows 
 never old, nor is subject to the despondency which 
 comes with advancing years to men and the genera- 
 tions of men. But few of us, I suppose, can see 
 much sign of a general and national conversion, such 
 as those we have been reviewing, among the teeming 
 swarms of India, or China, or Central Africa. Yet 
 we too, in our own branch of the Catholic Church, 
 have been long engaged in the work of Missions ; we 
 too have, year by year, gathered at least some 
 wanderers into the fold ; our sphere of operation is 
 widening ; to us the horizon is extending ; our sober 
 hopes are being gradually realized. We are offering 
 to all nations the blessing of the Gospel, to see 
 whether they will accept it or no. 
 
 But there are still two remarks which the general 
 tenor of the history before us leads me to make in 
 conclusion. The first is, that throughout the course 
 of our missionary efforts we have always honestly ab- 
 stained from the great vice of the medieval missions; 
 
 P 
 
2IO SL Gregory. 
 
 we have never laid claim to the exercise of super- 
 natural powers. We are thoroughly convinced that 
 upon such a claim no blessing can rest ; and I believe 
 I may safely say that no such pretension has been 
 advanced in behalf of any of our great preachers 
 among the heathen even after their deaths ; and 
 Swartz, Martyn, Heber, have been dead more than 
 fifty or sixty years. There are few perhaps of the 
 human inventions of the Eomish system to which 
 some of our eccentric brethren have not shown some 
 favour in our time ; but not one of them has ever 
 claimed for our Church the gift of miracles. I sup- 
 pose every one has felt that to put forth such pre- 
 tensions would stop at once the flow of missionary 
 zeal and of missionary charity among us. But I 
 would further remark that, while we renounce the 
 idea of a visible head of the Church Catholic en- 
 throned in the See of Eome with authority to direct 
 and control all its movements, we are fully sensible 
 of the advantage to the missionary among the 
 heathen of the sanction of an organized Church, 
 speaking through its appointed Ministers. The 
 Church of England has not left its children without 
 such a sanction. The humblest chaplain at our 
 remotest station may speak as one having authority 
 
St G7^ego7y. 2 1 r 
 
 derived from a great ecclesiastical centre ; as such 
 he may feel confidence in himself, and inspire confi- 
 dence in his hearers. For ourselves indeed, at home 
 the presence of our chief pastors so near at hand 
 may be sufficient encouragement ; but the labourers 
 far away, our brethren who are sowing and tending 
 the Word in America, in our own Colonies, in the 
 remote confines of the Pagan world, all these may 
 well require an assurance that the Eeformed branch 
 of the Church universal to which we belons: has its 
 bishops and its synods scattered throughout the 
 world, and that the authority they confer extends 
 far beyond the limits of the British isles or the 
 British possessions. The recent conferences of our 
 various national and provincial Prelates at Lambeth 
 seem to be the appointed opening of a great histori- 
 cal era in our Church. I trust that in another 
 generation it will be found that their united action 
 has imparted to our Anglican Missions in every 
 quarter all the confidence, all the vigour, all the 
 compact and consistent energy which were first 
 launched from the hands of the solitary despot of 
 Eome. 
 
 These concluding remarks may be deemed not 
 inopportune almost on the eve of the day which 
 
6V. Gregory 
 
 is assigned — the Feast of St. Andrew on Saturday 
 next — for Greneral Intercession for the conversion 
 of the heathen, and the progress of our Church 
 Missions. 
 
 *^,* These Lectures were delivered in November 
 1878, the last on the 27th day of the month, the 30th 
 being the day appointed for Greneral Intercession for 
 Christian Missions. 
 
 LONDON : PRINTED BY 
 
 SP0TTI8W00DE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARK 
 
 AND PARLIAUBNT 8TREBT 
 
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