freely in those who naturally were somewhat self-absorbed (it is worth notice that St. Theresa, B. Margaret Mary Alacoque, and Catharine Emmerich were all naturally dressy), and the author is not afraid of pressing his point by the severest imputations.

He follows Tertullian without exaggeration in the two treatises on Patience, and Zeal and Envy, both of which are devoted to enforcing peace upon the members of a community apt to be jealous and censorious in proportion to their earnestness and to the dangers to which they were exposed. This tendency was not lessened by the recurring outbreaks of persecution, which were inspired now by the fitful energy of the government, now by the irritability of the public, who, when things went wrong, were always in search of victims. Of course, as the old institutions continued to go to pieces, an increasing number of persons, of weak and uncertain character, sought the shelter of the new faith; and in time of trouble many of these gave way.

St. Cyprian, it is not too much to say, owes his place in ecclesiastical history, which is much higher than his place in ecclesiastical literature, to his dealing with the Lapsed and the Baptism of Heretics, which between them fill the greater part of his occasional writings. We have an eloquent cento of passages from the Bible, divided into three books, under the title of "Exhortation to Martyrdom," written to sustain his flock, from his retreat during the Decian persecution. But it does not seem to have been very effective; the weak made all sorts of compromises; some apostatized at the first proclamation, probably not thinking the comfort of their new creed. worth keeping at the risk of torture, ruin, and death; some went to the authorities and pleaded their conscientious objections to comply with the edict, after which some money passed, with the result that they had the credit in public of having denied the Lord, whom they had confessed in private. Sometimes they approached the altar and were allowed to retire without sacrificing; sometimes they took a certificate that they had sacrificed, or, if more scrupulous, a certificate of indemnity-from one or other the class were named Libella

tics; others, again, complied with the edict, in order to save their families and dependants from molestation; some, whose case St. Cyprian thought best of all, actually confessed and broke down under torture. Almost all intended to reconcile themselves with the Church when the persecution should be over, and almost all prepared the way for a reconciliation by effusive attentions to those who had stood where they had fallen. Then the confessors (who were for the time being nearly the only official representatives of the Church who could be consulted without danger to themselves) gave the penitents letters of peace; then, when the Church was free to meet again, its doors were besieged by a crowd of suppliants for indiscriminate pardon. Their prayers encountered no obstacle except from rigorists who wished to exclude them for life from Christian fellowship, until St. Cyprian gained a complete victory over both rigorism and laxity, and established the principle that each case should be judged on its merits by the bishop and presbyters, subject to the assent of the congregation. The task was difficult, because personal ambitions, especially among the richer members of the community, availed themselves of the question of principle on either side, and the confessors were by no means always willing to surrender the prerogative they had been used to exercise. It is clear that a good deal of diplomacy was necessary, and sometimes, perhaps, penitents owed their restoration to their submissiveness at least as much as to their sorrow. One correspondence is very curious. Celerinus writes to intercede for a sister, who had compromised herself almost involuntarily, and had been already admitted to "peace" by an enterprising confessor. The upshot of it was that the confessor finally found himself a schismatic, while Celerinus not only saw his sister restored to communion, but was himself promoted to the rank of deacon, with the promise of rising to be presbyter.

On the question of the rebaptism of heretics, St. Cyprian's correspondence is less interesting. He seems to have carried Africa with him without an effort, only to come into collision with Rome. Throughout his career he had been in close connection with Rome; he had supported Cornelius against

Novatian, who, according to his own account, was consecrated against his will by the rigorist party; he had needed and found the support of his own clergy when the clergy of Rome were inclined to censure him for his retreat from persecution; he had written a famous work on the Unity of the Church, which lent itself very naturally to interpolation in the interests of the Papacy. But when St. Stephen attempted to overrule the Bishop of Carthage, supported by the Synod of Africa, he refused to yield a hair's-breadth; and in that generation it certainly seemed as if the choice lay between principle and expediency: nothing was said on the Roman side to balance the aphorism, varied in so many forms, that only the one Church which can give salvation can give the new birth.

The only work of St. Cyprian which has been left unnoticed is an elaborate argument from Scripture against the Jews, whose claims had something of the effect in keeping waverers back from Christianity which the claims of Constantinople have upon those modern Christians who are or might be inclined to acknowledge the claims of Rome.

CHAPTER IV.

MINOR WRITERS.

JULIUS SOLINUS.

THE period in which St. Cyprian wrote was otherwise very barren from almost every point of view; it was a time of general public calamity, and in no department of literature was there a single memorable work. The age of the great jurists was over. Ulpianus, the last and by no means the greatest, was prætorian prefect to Alexander Severus, as Papinianus, a greater than he, had been prætorian prefect under Severus and Caracalla, while Gaius, whose Institutes were the foundation of all that came after, had not the right of giving opinions. Of course, when the first lawyer of the day was prætorian prefect, which practically meant being prime-minister, there was nothing for other jurists to do; and in a revolutionary state of things, when most prime-ministers, like both Papinian and Ulpian, were liable to be dismissed from office by a violent death, obviously knowledge of law was not likely to continue to bring a man to be prime-minister. The elaboration of Roman law as a science and a fine art practically came to a standstill with the death of Alexander Severus. What remained to be undertaken when better times made it possible was to reduce the whole to one body, which could be consecutively taught, and to fuse the results of imperial legislation with those of republican judges and imperialist text-writers into one coherent whole.

Absolutely the only important prose work of the period of Valerian and Gallienus which has reached us, the only work which seems to have attained any celebrity, is the work of Julius Solinus on Memorable Things. In the middle ages this work was very popular, and as early as the sixth century

He had

it had received a second title, "Polyhistor," which, as time went on, came to pass for the name of the author. done nothing but excerpt an abridgment of Pliny's "Natural History," which was also used and abused by Apuleius and Ammianus Marcellinus. His style, without being ridiculous or unintelligible, is rather empty and pretentious; but the excerptor had the advantage of being short and readable.

Three quarters of his work, which in Mommsen's edition contains 231 octavo pages, and consists of fifty-six chapters, are taken from Pliny, whom he did not always understand. In addition to Pliny, he used some good chronography of an author who was familiar with Verrius Flaccus and Varro, and is plausibly identified with Cornelius Bocchus, whom Pliny seems to have used for other purposes; also a “Chorographia Pliniana," in which the geographical information was methodically digested, and the geography of Pomponius Mela. The excerptor made no use of the chronography after the tenth chapter, but he continued to use Mela as far as the 206th page, and the Chorographia up to the 208th; his use of it can be traced by quotations from authors whom Pliny does not name. The excerptor intended to arrange the whole of the essential facts of Pliny's vast compilation in a topographical framework; but here, too, he fails to carry his programme through-nothing is reproduced that lies between the eleventh book, which treats of foreign trees, and the last, which treats of gems.

COMMODIAN.

In the poetry of the period we find the first sign of the complete breakdown of the language; Commodianus, a Christian poet of Gaza, wrote copiously in hexameters which are neither grammatically nor metrically correct. He is full of expres sions like nuntia, neuter plural for "news" milia, feminine singular for "a thousand." His metre is more eccentric still; it would be paying him a very exaggerated compliment to say that he writes in accentual hexameters. Often enough he gives a line where a modern ear misses little or nothing, like

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