a great many other instances, is profuse and multitudinous and We are certainly not far out from the correct

not absolutely safe. date in saying 351.

It illustrates a condition of things which are suggestive of the simplicity of the early Church, when we find that in spite of his being a married man and a father-and in spite of Cyprian's and of Tertullian's praises of celibacy-Hilary was heartily chosen and almost forced into the episcopate. In this position he exhibited "all the excellent qualities of the great bishops." We are told that he was "gentle and peaceable, given particularly to an ability to persuade and to influence." With these he joined "a holy vigor which held him firm against rising heresies." And Cassian says that Hilary "had all the virtues of an incomparable man." The fact, after all, speaks for itself more loudly than these commendations. He was so much one of themselves that the people of Poitiers would not have selected him, if they had not known him to be the best man for the mitre.

From this time began that career of stainless honor which has outlasted the very walls which echoed his voice. He was known from Great Britain to the Indies. He ranks second only to Athanasius as a defender of the faith; and—as we already noted— he is classed by Jerome with the great bishop of Hippo whose portrait is given to us so vividly in Charles Kingsley's Hypatia. And to us of our century and of our convictions in favor of charity and culture, it is particularly praiseworthy that he never gave up his secular scholarship, and that he never flagged or faltered in defending opinions which were as large and liberal as they were undeniably orthodox. He was an oak which stood against the blast unshaken, and which yet held, in the heart of its great branches, sweet nests of singing birds and leafy coverts of shade and peace.

Hilary was not suffered to be inactive. It was the period at which the Arian heresy was in full incandescence. No one holding the opinions of the Bishop of Poitiers could well remain neutral. He had-in conformity with a custom soon to become a law-separated his life from that of his home; but he appears always to have cherished a warm love for his wife and child. This placed him, however, in perfect freedom from other cares, liberty to devote himself to the eradication of false doctrine.

and at

Con

stantius, the Emperor, was an Arian, and this made the perplexity of the position very great. An honest man might ruin all by his blunt independence-but an honest man dare not be silent. And, besides, Hilary had neither attended the Synod of Arles (353) nor that of Milan (355), and was somewhat out of the ecclesiastical tide. That he was no coward was soon shown to everybody's satisfaction. He prepared a letter to the Emperor as brave as it was keen, and which touched up with a vigorous lash the cringing sycophants and shuffling hypocrites about the court. Hilary is notably strong when he denounces the substitution of force for reason and perhaps his doctorate came to him only in 1851 (when he could not well care much for it) because this doctrine of his was not altogether what Mother Church has been in the habit of teaching and practising! I may refer to the recent work of the Rev. R. T. Smith upon The Church in Roman Gaul as fully confirming this statement. St. Martin of Tours is there called to bear testimony that the Bishop of Poitiers held such opinions just as sturdily in his days of power as in these times of trial and persecution. He was, in short, a thoroughly sincere man, and it took him only a few years-until 355-to get into the hottest bubbling spot of all the caldron. At that date, in company with other leaders of the church in Gaul, he drove out a very pestilent fellow -Saturninus, the Bishop of Arles-as a seditious and irreconcilable element in their midst. With him was cast out Valens, and with Valens was cast out Ursacius. But of all these, Bishop Saturninus was the angriest and the most revengeful.

A year of something like good order followed, when lo, the Arians came to the front with a synod of their own complexion at Beziers. Here Hilary found himself in the vocative case altogether. The tables were turned upon him, and it was he who must now go forth a banished man. The power was against him, and he set out with bowed head and sad heart upon one of those pride-humbling journeys which have not seldom brought the greatest results to religion, and which not a few of the best men have taken in their day. In this manner Bernard went to meet Abælard; Martin Luther went to the diet at Worms; and John Bunyan took his way to Bedford jail.

Principal among the causes of his sadness was that he was snatched away from his constant and congenial duty of explaining

the Scriptures to the people of his diocese. Still he had nothing for it but to go; and so, somewhere about 356, we find him in Phrygia. He is accompanied by Rodanius, Bishop of Toulouse, who had plucked up considerable courage by seeing how well Hilary took his defeat.

In 357 the Church in Roman Gaul sent him their greeting, from which that of his own Poitiers people was not absent. And the Gallic bishops, having perceived him to be capable of much good service in his enforced residence abroad, bade him inform himself and them upon the creeds and customs of the Eastern Church. This he had already, to a degree, undertaken. And in 359, whom do we find entering a convocation of bishops at Seleucia but our very Hilary, opposing with a strong and unflinching philosophic power all those-and there were many there -who denied the consubstantiality of the Word.

was

There were one hundred and sixty of these bishops at Seleucia, of whom one hundred and five-a very handsome majority-were "semi-Arians." Of the remaining fifty-five there were nineteen classed as Anomoans-those who held that the Son unlike the Father in essence, or avóμozos-and the rest were heretics of different grades of badness. It was the natural outcome of the difficulties with Athanasius, where the royal authority was on the side of the Arians. The Roman Catholic historians are therefore not complimentary to this synod -or rather "double council'' of Seleucia and Rimini-and this was assuredly no very comfortable body of Christians for a banished bishop to exhort. But he did it with effect, and proceeded to the council at Constantinople (360) and did it again; and presently (361) Constantius died and the Nicene Creed was victorious.

So was Hilary, who-in 360-61-returned to Poitiers, where, as soon as his crozier was once more well in hand, he levelled Saturninus and compelled him to abandon his diocese. He then turned upon Auxentius of Milan, who only escaped the same or a worse fate by clinging to Valentinian, the reigning Emperor, and was denounced by Hilary as a hypocrite for his pains. Our bishop appears in these days to have been decidedly a member of the Church Militant; and perhaps it was natural enough when one had survived the reigns of Constantius, Julian the Apostate,

and Jovian, for him to be as he was. I am not commenting upon these exciting scenes; I desire rather to go back and show how they produced the hymns of which we are to speak.

It was in 357 at the same date with the letters from the bishops and from the churches-that Abra, his daughter, wrote to him herself. From this epistle we learn that her mother still lived, and we observe the dutiful and loving daughter apparent in every line. In reply Hilary sends a well-composed and even imaginative letter. Under the figures of a pearl and a garment he charges her to keep her soul and her conduct pure. He rather recommends a single life, but not in any such extravagant eulogy of celibacy as some would have us suppose. It is more after the style of what Grynaeus affirmed of him-that he was so moderate in these opinions as to suffer his canons to marry-since it would be hard for an unbiassed mind to draw any harsh conclusions from the language; yet all this is of small consequence compared with the enclosure-two Latin hymns, one for the morning and one for the evening, which she may use in the worship of God. The first of these is the Lucis largitor splendide; but the second is probably lost. It is said that it was the hymn, Ad coeli clara non sum dignus sidera-" To the clear stars of heaven I am not worthy," etc. This is very doubtful indeed, so much so that we may decline to receive it on several grounds. It is to be found in the superb folio edition of Hilary's works (Paris, 1693) prepared by the Benedictines of St. Maur. Yet if internal evidence is to weigh at all we must reject it without scruple. It is not a hymn in any true sense, and certainly has no reference to the evening hour of worship. It contains a gross phrase or two, which are not suggestive of Hilary, who would scarcely have said that he would "despise Arius" by "modulating a hymn" against him, nor would he have spoken of the "barking Sabellius" or the "grunting Simon." The verses are unpleasantly flavored with earthliness, and to think that a young girl would be inclined to sing ninetysix lines of an abecedary-or "alphabet-hymn"-is absurd. Moreover, the editors of the edition of 1693 only print four stanzas, and express their own disbelief that Hilary wrote it, based upon these facts and upon their no less important criticism of the style, which is masculine throughout, and refers to ideas highly inappropriate to the use intended. Mone is nearer to the correct doctrine

when he assigns it to a period between the sixth and eighth centuries. Daniel (4 130) prints it in full and quotes Mone's remark that an Irish monk is likely to have been its author. It is in the metre familiar to modern eyes in the Integer vitæ of Horace, but it displays neither taste nor poetry nor any religious fervor. That it begins each stanza with a consecutive letter of the alphabet is no proof of anything except wasted ingenuity. So that, I repeat, we do well to reject it and to leave it rejected.

All, then, that is left us is the Lucis largitor splendide—“ Thou splendid giver of the light." The letter went back from Seleucia to Poitiers and carried this hymn, at least, with it. Hilary had sent this and its companion, ut memor mei semper sis—“ that you may always remember me." And we may fancy the lovely high-born daughter of that earnest and scholarly man as, daily and nightly, she sits at her window-perchance with her gaze wistfully turned to the eastward. There she sang these simple, beautiful hymns-she the first singer of the new hymns of the Latin Church. Among the themes for Christian art yet left to us there is hardly one more suggestive than this-for Abra doubtless sang her father's hymns to her father's loyal people. It may even be supposed that he gave her the tunes as well as the words, and that, by morning and by night, the battle-scarred Poitiers re-echoed this voice of the exiled bishop.

Of the hymn itself as much can be said in favor as we have just said against its pretended and ill-matched companion. It breathes the Johannean sentiments throughout. It celebrates the Light, the Son of God, the glory of the Father, "clearer than the full sun, the perfect light and day itself." To one who is acquainted with the Greek hymns it is instantly suggestive of those pellucid songs-its atmosphere is all peace and its trust is as restful to the tired spirit as the quiet coming of the rising day. It may easily have been a translation from the Greek, or, even more easily, the natural up-gush of melody which was touched into life by the frequent hearing of the Eastern hymns. Hilary never learned it in an Arian church, nor did he find it among controversialists. Its nest, where it was first reared, was in some corner of a catacomb or in some nook of the Holy Land. This hymn, then, we may safely accept as the oldest authentic original Latin "song of praise to Christ as God.”