raise the value of property and improve the temporal condition of the worshippers,—­so that temporal thrift was made to be indissolubly connected with public worship.  “Go to church, and you will thrive in business.  Become a Sabbath-school teacher, and you will gain social position.”  Such arguments logically grow out from linking the kingdom of heaven with success in life, and worldly prosperity with the outward performance of religious duties,—­all of which may be true, and certainly marks Protestantism, but is somewhat different from the ideas of the Church eighteen hundred years ago.  But those were unenlightened times, when men said, “How hardly shall they who have riches enter into the kingdom of God.”

I pass now to consider the services which Ambrose rendered to the Church, and which have given him a name in history.

One of these was the zealous conservation of the truths he received on authority.  To guard the purity of the faith was one of the most important functions of a primitive bishop.  The last thing the Church would tolerate in one of her overseers was a Gallio in religion.  She scorned those philosophical dignitaries who would sit in the seats of Moses and Paul, and use the speculations of the Greeks to build up the orthodox faith.  The last thing which a primitive bishop thought of was to advance against Goliath, not with the sling of David, but with the weapons of Pagan Grecian schools.  It was incumbent on the watchman who stood on the walls of Zion, to see that no suspicious enemy entered her hallowed gates.  The Church gave to him that trust, and reposed in his fidelity.  Now Ambrose was not a great scholar, nor a subtle theologian.  Nor was he dexterous in the use of dialectical weapons, like Athanasius, Augustine, or Thomas Aquinas.  But he was sufficiently intelligent to know what the authorities declared to be orthodox.  He knew that the fashionable speculations about the Trinity were not the doctrines of Paul.  He knew that self-expiation was not the expiation of the cross; that the mission of Christ was something more than to set a good example; that faith was not estimation merely; that regeneration was not a mere external change of life; that the Divine government was a perpetual interference to bring good out of evil, even if it were in accordance with natural law.  He knew that the boastful philosophy by which some sought to bolster up Christianity was that against which the apostles had warned the faithful.  He knew that the Church was attacked in her most vital points, even in doctrines,—­for “as a man thinketh, so is he.”

So he fearlessly entered the lists against the heretics, most of whom were enrolled among the Manicheans, Pelagians, and Arians.

The Manicheans were not the most dangerous, but they were the most offensive.  Their doctrines were too absurd to gain a lasting foothold in the West.  But they made great pretensions to advanced thought, and engrafted on Christianity the speculations of the East as to the origin of evil and the nature of God.  They were not only dreamy theosophists, but materialists under the disguise of spiritualism.  I shall have more to say of these people in the next Lecture, on Augustine, since one of his great fights was against the Manichean heresy.  So I pass them by with only a brief allusion to their opinions.