CHAPTER X.

CHURCH-BUILDING.-MAXIMUS AND JUSTINA.

A.D. 386-387.

THE reverence with which Ambrose was regarded was soon after enhanced by a circumstance which was considered at the time as a proof of Divine favour,— the discovery of the bodies of the martyrs Gervasius and Protasius. He had been requested to consecrate a new church in the same manner as one which he had not long before solemnly dedicated-the "Roman basilica," as it was called, from being situated near the Roman gate of Milan. "To do this," he said, "I must find the remains of martyrs"; for the prevailing custom then was to build churches, if possible, over the tombs of those who had died for the faith, or else, when they were built, to hallow them by placing some martyr's earthly frame to rest within them. Search had to be made, nor did it seem likely to be rewarded, for Mediolanum had not been fruitful in martyrs. The bishop was led to desire an excavation to be made in front of the chancel of the church of SS. Felix and Nabor, otherwise called St. Philip's. It is still in existence, though not used as a place of worship. There were found the remains of two tall men, the skeletons quite complete, surrounded by a quantity of blood. A corrupt practice had arisen,

which later ages have only too faithfully copied, of breaking up such relics into fragments, carrying them about, and disposing of them for money; and a law against so doing was enacted by Theodosius in this very year. These bodies were not so treated: they were carefully embalmed and preserved entire, and were conveyed for the night to the church of Fausta (now the chapel of St. Satyrus). There they were watched, and the next day transferred to the new church, close at hand, which was called by the name of Ambrose himself. As they passed, a blind man received his sight.

Such is the account given by Ambrose in a letter to his sister Marcellina. The main points are repeated by St. Augustine, who adds what Ambrose himself stated in two sermons, of which he gives his sister a sketch, that many cures were effected and many evil spirits cast out by the instrumentality of the holy martyrs.

The bodies were identified as those of Gervasius and Protasius, two Milanese, who had suffered three centuries before, in the time of Nero or Domitian. Their place of burial had been forgotten, till the discovery of their remains brought it to the recollection of some old people, who remembered having heard their names and read the inscription on their tomb.

The Arian party denied the bodies to be those of martyrs at all, and derided the idea of miraculous cures, accusing the bishop of having hired men to personate demoniacs and to feign themselves to have been healed of diseases. Ambrose, however, writes apparently with the most perfect sincerity and good faith; Augustine and Paulinus evidently believed most

implicitly in the truth of the whole story. The latter is no doubt a credulous writer: the life, or rather the memoir, of Ambrose, which we have under his name, contains a number of marvels, which are due to a loving but decidedly uncritical imagination. In this case, however, he expresses himself as if from personal knowledge. The man who received his sight was named, he tells us, Severus, and was often seen by hm in later times as a constant worshipper in the Ambrosian church. He says he was cured on touching the dress of the martyrs. Augustine, who writes as an eyewitness, tells us that the man was well known to all the citizens, and that he recovered his sight on applying to his eyes a handkerchief with which he had been permitted to touch the bier on which the holy relics lay.

The affectionate interest with which the early Church regarded the earthly remains of holy men, ard especially of martyrs, is scarcely intelligible to us : we identify it with the thick crust of error which has grown up in the Roman Church around the doctrine of the communion of saints and the state of the departed. We shrink from a history which, thanks to papal perversion of the truth, seems to introduce us to a superstitious, if not idolatrous, veneration of a decaying creature. But what seems idolatry and superstition in the nineteenth century, after the false teachings of the thirteenth and the reaction of the sixteenth, was not necessarily such in the fourth, any more than the free expressions of an Ante-Nicene writer about the Son of God prove him to have held the doctrine of Arius.

We are, moreover, naturally reluctant to give credence to accounts of post-apostolic miracles. They are not needed by us, says St. Chrysostom, nor ough: we to be grieved that we do not see them: they were given for those that did not believe. So we habituall reject each story as a whole, instead of criticising the alleged miracle as such. In this case so distinct are

the expressions of Ambrose and his disciples, that we cannot imagine them to have been simply mistaken, stil less to have been deceived by a series of cleverlyarranged tricks; and we are forced either to admit that things did happen much as they describe, or else t believe, with the Arians and Gibbon, that the great bishop of Milan was guilty of an impious fraud; that he not only wrote to his sister, but also in solemi words, and in the name of his Master, asseverated, in a consecrated place, and before a company of Chris tians, what he and many of them knew to be an absclute falsehood; and that he either deceived those whom he taught, or persuaded them to conspire with him in bearing testimony to the lie which he had devised. Whether we consider the occurrence to have been really miraculous or not, is quite another question. Without pronouncing decisively for or against the credibility of miracles later than A.D. 100, we may at least suggest that we have here the account of some exceptional phenomena, unscientifically given. Those who think it more likely that a Christian bishop should, with the connivance and approbation of other Christians, invent, solemnly assert, and propagate, a wicked untruth, than that cures apparently miraculous should have been wrought as described, will of course

reject the whole tale; while those who admire the straightforward honesty of Augustine's treatise De Mendacio will be disposed to think that he at least believed, and felt assured that the teacher whom he so revered believed also, what they have both recorded: and that they, and Christian people generally, did actually look upon what happened as a testimony from above in favour of the martyrs, and, inferentially, in favour of the Catholic doctrine.

The Paschal tide both of 385 and 386 had been a time of alarm and disquiet for Ambrose. That of the next year1 (387) was marked by a very different event-the baptism of his spiritual scholar Augustine, with his son Adeodatus, and his friend Alypius. Tradition, which has been over-busy with the lives of the saints, converting legend into history till history is mistaken for legend, has introduced here a story we could well wish it were possible to believe—that the glorious "Te Deum" was composed by bishop and neophyte in a burst of ecstasy immediately after the performance of the sacred rite, and chanted alternately by them as they returned from the baptistery to their places in the church. But it cannot have been. It is interesting that Augustine mentions the effect produced on him by the church music which Ambrose had introduced the year before; and there is very little doubt, also, that it is to the period of preparation of the catechumens of this year that we must refer, besides other treatises, the short but

'There is some doubt whether this date be the correct one; but the chronology which fixes the event to this year in preference to 386 or 388 (Baronius) seems the most consistent.