and desert is discussed with reference to a future life, though there is still a relic of the old Stoical arguments about virtue being best tested in affliction, and the prosperity which is due to ability and prudence apart from virtue.

The most important of the strictly dogmatic works are the five books "De Verbo," addressed to Gratian, the pious emperor who fell a victim to his taste for barbarian guards and field-sports, and they are what might be expected of an argument addressed to one who did not need convincing.

It is curious that we have no funeral oration on his death as we have on that of Valentinian II. and Theodosius: the second of these is little more than a panegyric on a devout and orthodox and successful emperor; the first has more interest, as Valentinian had come to cling to the prelate who had successfully resisted his government and supported his title. Another pathetic circumstance was that the young emperor, who was anxious to be baptized, had sent for Ambrose to admit him to the Church and to mediate between him and Arbogastes, the Frank commander of his bodyguard. Before Ambrose could arrive Arbogastes had settled the dispute by killing the emperor, and Ambrose could only express his regrets and compare the baptism of desire which Valentinian and Gratian had received with the baptism of blood which availed to martyrs who had missed the baptism of water. Both are inferior to the pathetic books on the "departure of his brother Satyrus," the first of which was delivered at the burial while the body lay with open face at the foot of the pulpit: the second, which is a sermon on the Resurrection, was delivered eight days afterwards. The first contains several curious traits of the manners of the time: the family had property in Africa, of which the proceeds were embezzled by the manager. St. Ambrose and St. Marcellina wished to leave him in peace and to abide at peace themselves, while Satyrus, who did not care more than they did about the money, could not reconcile it to his conscience to connive at fraud. He succeeded in compelling restitution; but on his way back he was shipwrecked and lost the money: he attributed his own preservation to having purchased the host

from a Christian fellow-passenger (Satyrus himself was still a catechumen). As soon as he was in safety he was baptized, and died, to his brother's great distress, just after his return to Milan.

Considering the depth of personal affection in this work, it is noteworthy that there are so few confidential letters; the chief are to his sister Marcellina: of these the most important is that on the discovery of the bodies of St. Gervasius and St. Protasius, which is the first chapter of as long a history as the penance of Theodosius. As there is a prophecy of many future miracles in the butcher who said he recovered his sight by touching the bones of the martyrs, to the great edification of the Catholics who knew that he was honestly blind, and to the scandal of the Arians who asserted that he was counterfeiting, there is a survival of old imaginative conventions in St. Ambrose's assumption that the martyrs who suffered less than a hundred years before he wrote were of a stature to shame the men of his degenerate day. The most interesting of the other letters are either little treatises like the 41st, in which the writer explains that Paradise ought to be understood of the state in which the soul had the intuitive vision of archetypal ideas; or state papers like the 17th and 18th on the relation of Symmachus, or the 40th addressed to Theodosius on the synagogue of Callinicum. The bishop of the place had instigated the people to destroy it, and Theodosius insisted that the bishop should restore the synagogue out of the church funds. St. Ambrose encloses a sermon in which, without discussing the question whether a bishop is justified in procuring the destruction of a synagogue, it is victoriously maintained that to apply church funds to the restoration of a synagogue would be horrible sacrilege. Modern readers will sympathize more readily with the 51st letter on the massacre at Thessalonica, though there, too, the strong side of the emperor's case is ignored: a very large mob was guilty, it was difficult or impossible to ascertain who had been foremost in the onslaught on the imperial officers who were butchered; under the circumstances Theodosius had filled the circus with another mob (composed in great part of the same persons), and massacred the whole.

The majority of the letters bear simply upon current episcopal business: we may mention also two confidential letters, 48, 49, to Sabinus, a brother bishop, to whom he communicated his unpublished works for criticism. The commentaries on St. Luke are almost entirely dependent upon Origen, and are noticeable chiefly as showing that the author accepts the Alexandrian tendency to get rid of the difficulty of apparently irreconcilable narratives by taking each as the symbol of spiritual truths between which there is no dis

crepancy.

The hymns of St. Ambrose are at once among the most important and the most doubtful of his works: three are attested by St. Augustin, which begin "Deus Creator omnium," "Æterne rerum conditor," "Jam surgit hora tertia ;" a fourth, "Veni redemptor gentium," is attested by St. Cælestin in 430, and also in a sermon which may not improbably be by St. Augustin. It is tolerably certain that he wrote much more, probably as largely as St. Ephraim, whom he appears to have imitated; for the churches of the Eastern parts probably point to Syria. Bede, three centuries later, knew of a large number of Ambrosian hymns, and the oldest MSS. of St. Ambrose give a large and fluctuating number of hymns; but only twelve at the utmost satisfy the metrical standard of the four authentic hymns. In these we have four stanzas of four iambic dimeters, each perfectly regular in metre, except that a short syllable is lengthened in arsi; they conform, too, to the rule laid down for "Ambrosian hymns" by Bede, that the sense must close with a line, in order that the choirs may answer one another without a break. The first three are for the first three hours of prayer, the fourth is for Christmas Eve, and is probably a sample of the numerous dogmatic hymns which were the chief means of training the people of Milan to a zeal for orthodoxy. They all have the character of deep spontaneous feeling, flowing in a clear, rhythmical current, and show a more genuine literary feeling than the prose works, in which the tendency to popularize, for practical purposes, rather overpowers the author's real interest in the beauties of nature and declamatory pathos.

ST. JEROME.

St. Jerome has infinitely more of the genuine spirit of a man of letters than any of his contemporaries, except Ausonius, and he has infinitely more literary power than any, except his younger contemporary St. Augustin, who in most of his works is deliberately indifferent to style. What makes this more interesting is his extraordinary ascetical and polemical fervor, which at one time made him renounce the study of secular literature altogether, and ended by leading him to concentrate his literary interest increasingly within the sphere of biblical scholarship.

In another way he is singular. He was born in Stridon, in Pannonia; Latin was his mother-tongue, but both his names (Eusebius Hieronymus) are Greek, and one is tempted to suppose that his parents were Latinized Greeks, such as are still to be found among the aristocracy of Roumania. His education was entirely Latin, and it continued very long. He was born, according to the Chronicle of Prosper, in A.D. 331, and he did not retire to the wilderness of Chalcis till 374, and this may be said to mark the date of his final conversion and of his literary activity. We hear of his studying at Rome under the celebrated Donatus, and then going for two years to Trèves, where he perhaps felt himself more at ease than at Rome, for Trèves was in those days a capital where a foreigner from the frontier would not be oppressed by the traditions of superior culture. His youth at Rome was stormy, to judge by his own letters to St. Eustochium: he threw himself vigorously into all the dissipations of the city while still a laborious student; for he acquired his library by the arduous process of copying it. At Trèves he commenced his clerical studies by copying two works of St. Hilary of Poitiers on the Psalter and the Synods (which the Semi-Arians had multiplied); from Trèves he went to Aquileia, the frontier city of Italy, and there fell into a circle of young men, of whom Rufinus was the most distinguished, who wished to anticipate on earth what they imagined of the bliss of disembodied spirits. So far as material occupation seemed necessary they found it in the study of Greek

theology, which, especially in the biblical and historical departments, was built upon the labors of Origen; and at one time St. Jerome was exceedingly intimate with Rufinus, who seems to have been three or four years younger than himself, but already had settled down to a regular course of self-discipline. From Aquileia St. Jerome sailed to Syria, intending to visit the holy places and the eminent ascetics of the East; something had arisen to make it necessary for him to leave Aquileia, and it is natural to think of some scandal, or perhaps the first of his many quarrels; at any rate, he was rapidly disgusted with his former life. The climate of Syria did not suit him or his companion; the latter died suddenly; he himself was long prostrated by a severe intermittent fever. In his intervals of ease he found the Latin classics much more refreshing reading than the existing Latin versions of the Old Testament, and consequently one night (? when unusually feverish) he had a dream, in which his spirit was brought up for judgment. He appealed for mercy upon his sins, on the ground that he was a Christian, at any rate; and was told he lied—he was a Ciceronian, not a Christian; and was finally dismissed to do penance after being severely scourged. He renounced classical studies for years, and shortly after retired from Antioch to the wilderness of Chalcis, whence he wrote some curious letters to his friends at Aquileia, in which he deplores his inferiority to his companions, who have conquered their temptations, and expresses his own unhappy state by the help of biblical metaphors. It might fairly be said that his retreat at Chalcis marks an era in the progress of asceticism. St. Chrysostom, who not so many years before had been a sojourner in the same wilderness, wrote a tract to prove that the monks were the true philosophers, and their life the true philosophy; and this was still the dominant view, though many ascetics in Egypt had already arrived at the conviction that penitence, not to say remorse, was the mainspring of asceticism. But the doctrine, as a doctrine, " Monachus non docentis sed plangentis habet officium" ("a monk's business is to be a mourner, not a teacher"), was new in the mouth of St. Jerome. It goes beyond the pessimism of Tertullian or St. Cyprian. With them