interred at Milan, but should be conveyed to Constantinople, there to lie with the remains of his predecessors in the Empire of the East. Before its departure, and forty days after his death, solemn obsequies were celebrated at the city where he had sinned the great sin of his life, where he had shown his deep penitence, where he had celebrated his last triumph, and drawn his last breath. The funeral

oration could be spoken by none but Ambrose. The rhetorical element, though present and palpable, is not so painfully prominent in it as in that on the death of Valentinian. The preacher spoke feelingly of the ability, clemency, and many virtues of the departed emperor, paying a compliment to the talents of his sons and successors which a few years unhappily showed to be entirely undeserved. Most of all, however, he extolled his humble piety. "No doubt," he said, "the devout emperor is now at rest,

in

peace and light, in the company of the saints who have gone before." An allusion to Constantine the Great here led him to digress into an apparently purposeless narration of the story-or rather the strange legend-of the finding of the Cross by Helena. Finally, he comforted poor little Honorius, who sat crying bitterly at not being allowed to accompany his father's body and go back to his brother Arcadius at Constantinople, his old home. The preacher reminded him that he was now an emperor, and had a solemn duty towards all, so that he must no longer think of his father only. "Do not fear," he concluded, "that your father's triumphant remains, wherever they may go, will appear shorn of honour. Italy does not

think so, she who has beheld magnificent triumphs, and whose children, freed a second time from tyrants, are waiting to extol the author of their liberty. Constantinople does not think so, who sent forth her prince a second time to victory, and, much as she would, could not retain him. She looked for triumphal solemnities on his return, to do honour to his victories; she looked for an emperor of the whole world, surrounded with an army from Gaul, supported by the forces of the whole world. But Theodosius now returns to her with higher power, with greater glory, for it is a troop of angels that accompanies him, a crowd of saints that follows him. Blessed indeed is the city that is receiving an inhabitant of Paradise, and will entertain, in the splendid abode where his body is to rest, a denizen of the heavenly city above."

CHAPTER XV.

THE END OF A GREAT LIFE.

A.D. 395-397.

AMBROSE'S Own term was now drawing to a close. He was in his fifty-fifth year, scarcely more than a middle-aged man according to our reckoning. But the anxieties and labours of twenty years had had their effect upon him; and his ascetic mode of life, if it enhanced his spiritual powers, did not certainly increase his physical strength. He allowed himself no midday meal except on Sundays and saints' days, and, owing to a fortunate peculiarity of his own church, on Saturdays also; the Saturday feast, we learn, was one of the usages of the Church of Milan, for in Rome the "Sabbath" (the day before the Lord's Day) was kept as a fast. And at the same time he was continually engaged in preaching, writing (not by an amanuensis, but with his own hand), and in giving counsel to those who resorted to him. The wear of this branch of the pastoral office must have been excessive. Numbers flocked to him to give him their confidences before performing that public penance for sin which was customary at that time, and to ask his advice and consolation; and he threw

himself heart and soul into each case, "rejoicing," says Paulinus, "with them that did rejoice, and weeping with them that did weep; for he would weep so with one who acknowledged his errors with a view to penance, as to force him to weep also." His assiduity about the due performance of the rites of religion was equally great, and involved almost an equal tax on his energies, for he would do singlehanded at baptisms what five bishops of his time could scarcely perform together. When we remember that at Milan in the fourth century a baptism implied commonly the immersion of a number of adults, and was not confined to the pouring of water on a few infants, we shall see that the bodily fatigue of a solemn baptismal day to the officiating bishop (for it was he, not the presbyters, still less the deacons, who usually administered the sacrament) must have been enormous.

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The death of Theodosius, while it could have no effect upon his austerities and his labours, must have increased tenfold his anxieties for Church and State. The Huns, a new and terrible enemy, were beginning to threaten the East. The Goths, under Alaric, were stirring in Greece. Gildo the Moor (the brother of that Firmus whom the father of Theodosius had subdued for Valentinian I. in 374) was a rebel, and all but independent, in Africa, and had proclaimed himself a supporter of the persecuting Donatists. With a gentle but unpromising boy of ten (Honorius) for emperor of the West, and an equally gentle fool of eighteen (Arcadius) ruling in the East, guided by the contemptible and irreligious Rufinus, the most dismal forebodings

respecting the Empire were inevitable. But the battle of the Faith was already won in the West, and no one had contributed more to the victory than the great Bishop of Milan himself. That man could not fail to leave his mark upon the Church who had brought a Theodosius to do penance and converted an Augustine. Three years later (398), John, the eloquent and fearless preacher of Antioch, was to ascend the patriarchal throne of Constantinople, and leave his mark too behind him, as a champion of the truth in the East, following up and completing the work of Basil and Gregory Nazianzen. The Church was sure to hold her own when it pleased her Divine Master to send her such rulers as Ambrose and Chrysostom.

Stilicho, who was during the minority of Honorius the virtual Emperor of the West, and had taken care to prevent, by the death of Rufinus, the presence of a rival in the East, discovered soon that the old spirit was not extinct in the Bishop of Milan. One Cresconius, a criminal, had been condemned to be exposed to the wild beasts in the Amphitheatre. Christianity had not yet succeeded in inducing the Romans to lay aside their barbarous delight in the sanguinary spectacles of the arena; it has not yet led their Spanish descendants to give up the bull-fight, and only a century ago similar "sports were not unknown to the inhabitants of a western isle who prided themselves on possessing a purer form of Christianity than that of modern Spain, or, as some of them even said, than that of Milan fourteen centuries before. The unhappy wretch had managed to make his escape, and fled for refuge into a church. Stilicho