the Basilica, and he, with persistent firmness, declared the inviolability of the church, and that the bishop cannot alienate the temple of God. He further said that if the emperor had no right over a private house, much less had he over the house of God. They said: "Everything is permitted to the emperor." He replied, "That his right did not extend to that which belonged to the Most High." They said, "Surely the emperor ought to have a church to worship in." He answered, "What has the emperor to do with an adulteress, the church of heretics?" The secretary of the emperor came. "The emperor wishes to know," he said, "why you raise yourself to be a tyrant." He replied, "If I am a tyrant, why not punish me with death? The tyranny of a bishop is in his feebleness. Maximus did not think I was the tyrant of Valentinian when I prevented his coming into Italy. Priests have bestowed empire; they never condescend to assume it." The emperor himself was urged to confront the bishop. The young man answered, "His eloquence would compel you to give me up to his power." There was nothing to be done with the refractory priest. The triumph was with him. The empress was obliged to yield, or to postpone her purpose and her revenge. She tried again, and again it was Ambrose who conquered. He was sentenced to exile; he refused to go, and the people would not let him go. And at last he found, or heaven found for him, the means of finishing the contest.

It was during its progress, according to Augustine, that Ambrose first introduced the antiphonal singing to relieve the vigils of the people. "Then it was first instituted that after the manner of the Eastern churches, hymns and psalms should be sung, lest the people should wax faint through the tediousness of sorrow."1 It was closed as last by what was counted divine interposition. The people were already with Ambrose. His character, his eloquence, his benevolence, and his very firmness and courage, the awful assertion of an authority higher than the emperor's, carried captive the popular mind. It was a time of high religious excitement among a people who were the ancestors of the impressionable, ardent Italians of to-day. They were ready to invest the champion of his order, of the Catholic faith, of the contending church with even supernatural power. And he ministered to their enthusiasm, and at least made use of their credulity. By some strong presentiment, in a vision, as Augustine, who was then in Milan, says, the bishop was directed to a spot where the remains of two martyrs, SS. Gervasius and Protasius, had been buried for three hundred years. They were of

gigantic proportions, their heads severed from the body, and the tomb filled with blood. The relics were conveyed with pompous ceremonial to the Ambrosian church, which he dedicated to them, but upon which posterity has placed his own more illustrious name. A healing power went out from them; a blind man recovered his sight, and the wonder kindled the enthusiasm of an excitable people. It was not in human nature, not in ecclesiastical human nature at any rate, not to avail itself of such a fortunate occasion to fortify the per, secuted bishop in his conflict with heretic power. The Arian empress and her adherents were incredulous. But the people believed, and it was not for a boy of sixteen, though he were sovereign of Italy, to stand against a bishop clothed with such sanctity, and crowned with such honors from above. Opposition was swept away before the enthusiasm which had been so wonderfully, if not so skillfully enlisted. The altar was mightier than the throne.

And now it is that his life comes into relation with the two great men of his age. His connection with Augustine may have been brief, his influence not profound, and yet at a critical period it was decisive. It was in the year 383, when he was twenty-nine years old, that Augustine came to Milan. He had run a wild career of mingled passion and study, of spiritual dreaming, of religious yearning, of philosophical speculation. This irregular development of a powerful mind was about to issue in the repose, or at least the confidence, of a settled faith, and of a devout life. He came under the influence of Ambrose, and was moved by his eloquence. He came into deeper and spiritual sympathy with the writings of St. Paul, and exchanged the Hortensius of Cicero for the Epistle to the Romans. Through throes of spiritual agony he came into the kingdom of heaven. By the hand of Ambrose he was baptized, and led into that church whose doctrine he has moulded, if he has not shaped its fortunes, as perhaps no other single mind has done. His example is less historic and commanding, his bishopric less conspicuous; but as ideas in the long run rule the world, it is the fervid and profound theologian, rather than the courageous and imperious churchman, the catechumen rather than the preacher in the Ambrosian Basilica whose sceptre is longest, and who is still bishop over almost the church universal.

Theodosius was now the real master of the Roman world. His sword had rescued the West from the power of Maximus, and his generosity had restored and secured the trembling throne of Valentinian. The potent offices of Ambrose had been invoked a second time for the protection of the young and feeble emperor, and to

check the progress of the usurper, even in the midst of his sharp feud with the heretic empress. She lived to see the triumph of the great emperor who had married her daughter, and rescued her son. But she died soon, and with her died the Arianism of Valentinian, and the hopes of its party. For three years he was in Italy, much of it in Milan, under the eye of its archbishop. Before, Ambrose had been contending with a weak emperor and against heresy. He has now to meet a Cæsar worthy of the great days of the empire, who is a Catholic not to contend with so much as to control. And with the weak and the mighty alike he asserts the supremacy of the church and the authority of the priesthood. The conqueror, the ruler of the world, in the height of his power, finds at Milan, if nowhere else, a tribunal to which he must bow, a person before whose rebuke he quails. The Christians in Callinicum had burned a Jewish synagogue, it was said, by the advice of their bishops. Some monks, incensed by an interruption of one of their processions in the road, burned a church belonging to some Valentinian Gnostics. The emperor, with such ideas of justice as would be tolerably obvious to the lay mind, ordered that the bishop rebuild the synagogue, and that the rioters should make fair compensation to the heretics for their loss. This was far beyond the diocese of Ambrose, and he himself was off at Aquileia, at the head of the Adriatic. But he felt that by his position he was the champion of the true faith wherever menaced. He wrote to the emperor, vindicating the bishop. If the bishop complied with the imperial mandate he would be an apostate, and the emperor would be reponsible. It was only repaying in kind what the orthodox had suffered at the hands of Jews and heretics. But the letter failed of its purpose. Ambrose returned to Milan and renewed his charge in the church, refusing to proceed with the mass till the emperor yielded, and granted lenity to the offenders.

But we are now to see the bold prelate taking a still loftier attitude, vindicating outraged justice, and bringing the loftiest head in Europe to bow before the altar in humble and penitent confession. In a thousand years Rome had seen great crimes in the head of the state, had seen bloody deeds and intolerable despotism go unrebuked, had never seen the emperor bow to a subject, and acknowledge in him a moral majesty greater than his own proud and unchallenged authority. But it is the last of the great emperors, and the last at whose feet the whole Roman empire bowed, who now bends subdued before a priest whom, a hundred years before, the Emperor Diocletian might have given to the headsman, or tossed to the lions in the

Flavian amphitheatre. Theodosius was a man of many noble and manly virtues, and had often shown an imperial clemency and generosity. But he was quick in passion, and often broke into great tempests of anger. The people in Thessalonica had been affronted by Botheric, the king's lieutenant, and in an affray he, with several imperial officers, was killed. Theodosius, notwithstanding all attempts to allay his resentment, resolved on secret and summary vengeance. While the whole population was gathered in the circus, a signal was given to the troops secretly posted round it, and an indiscriminate and horrible massacre followed. For three hours the carnage went on, till the blood of seven thousand persons, strangers and natives, of all ages, of either sex, the guilty and the innocent, was shed in expiation of the offence.

Ambrose heard of it, and whether in terror or in grief retired into the country to avoid the presence of the emperor. He sent him a letter expressing his horror at the crime in which he would be an accomplice if he kept silence. He exhorted him to penitence, and promised him his prayers. But he warned him not to come to the altar, for he would not communicate with a man stained with the blood of thousands of innocent people. For eight months the emperor waited in seclusion, not daring to come to the church. The slave and the beggar could enter, but the sovereign of the world was shut out. This he felt, and through his minister sought of the prelate some relaxation of the hard sentence. But Ambrose answered that the emperor might march over his dead body, he would not allow him to come into the church. At length the emperor was allowed to enter one of the cloisters of the church, where he professed himself ready to submit to whatever Ambrose should prescribe. After some parley the bishop consented to remove his interdict on two conditions. First, that he should issue an edict prohibiting the execution of capital punishment for thirty days after conviction, and that he should submit to public penance. The emperor was not content to fall on his knees to receive absolution. He prostrated himself on the pavement, tore his hair, struck his forehead and watered the ground with tears. It is but the anticipation in spirit of Henry IV, seven centuries later, imploring in the snow at the gates of Canossa, the absolution of the prouder and mightier Gregory. And so the conqueror of the world was conquered, and confessed that there is a majesty greater than that of kings. Humanity and justice could look up and feel that they had found a friend, and a champion more than imperial. It was one of the great events, one of the sublimest pictures of history. It was the moral authority of Christianity holding in check arbitrary

power, establishing a tribunal which should protect the meanest and punish the mightiest. It was sacerdotal power, carrying in itself the latent peril of abuse for religious oppression and persecution, and yet exercising in pure hands a wholesome control over the insolence of irresponsible greatness, and the cruelty of despotic and intemperate passion. It was the gates of the same Portian Basilica, now the church of San Vittore al Corpo, which the prelate had closed against the heretic empress, which were also shut against the orthodox emperor. One is still shown at the Church of San Ambrogio two panels of cypress wood, which are said to be parts of the ancient gates before which this immortal transaction happened. And one sees in the Belvedere Gallery at Vienna the picture in which the masterly hand of Rubens has reproduced the great spectacle.

Ambrose lived to pronounce the funeral orations over Valentinian and Theodosius. He refused to acknowledge the authority or receive the gifts of Eugenius. He retired from Milan till the conquering arms of Theodosius had reduced the east and west to his sway. The victorious emperor came to Milan to finish the brief remainder of his days, commending his sons in his dying hours to the archbishop, by whose moral influence he had been persuaded to abstain from the eucharist while his hands were stained with the blood of a war which his Christianity could not but justify.

Not long after, in 397, on the fourth of April, in the fifty-seventh year of his age, after a service in the church of twenty-three years, the good bishop of the Milanese, the imperial ecclesiastic of his age, finished his days. Stilicho, the great general, was then at Milan, and urged the people to send to the bishop, asking him to offer his own more effective prayers for his recovery. He replied: "I have not so lived among you as to be ashamed to live; I have so good a Master that I am not afraid to die." For five hours he held his hands crossed in the attitude of prayer, and so expired. His body is kept in the ancient basilica which bears his name. In the Duomo, the corpse of San Carlo Borromeo sleeps in a shrine of silver and crystal, dressed in gorgeous pontificals, and stared at by eyes curious or devout. But the shrine of Ambrose is the sanctity, the memory which, through fourteen centuries, has hung invisible round his grave. He has the rare and double honor of a place among the saints of the Eastern as well as of the Latin Church-his name enrolled with Basil, Athanasius and the Gregories, as well as with Cyprian and Augustine.

The works of Ambrose the Benedictines have collected in two folio volumes. It has already been intimated that he was a churchman