not only praises the private life of Ambrose, but the eloquence of his sermons; and I suppose that Augustine was a judge in such matters.  “For,” says Augustine, “while I opened my heart to admire how eloquently he spoke, I also felt how truly he spoke.”  Everybody equally admired and loved this great metropolitan, because his piety was enlightened, because he was above all religious tricks and pious frauds.  He even refused money for the Church when given grudgingly, or extorted by plausible sophistries.  He remitted to a poor woman a legacy which her brother had given to the Church, leaving her penniless and dependent; declaring that “if the Church is to be enriched at the expense of fraternal friendships, if family ties are to be sundered, the cause of Christ would be dishonored rather than advanced.”  We see here not only a broad humanity, but a profound sense of justice,—­a practical piety, showing an enlightened and generous soul.  He was not the man to allow a family to be starved because a conscience-stricken husband or father wished, under ghostly influences and in face of death, to make a propitiation for a life of greediness and usurious grindings, by an unjust disposition of his fortune to the Church.  Possibly he had doubts whether any money would benefit the Church which was obtained by wicked arts, or had been originally gained by injustice and hard-heartedness.

Thus does Saint Ambrose come down to us from antiquity,—­great in his feats of heroism, great as an executive ruler of the Church, great in deeds of benevolence, rather than as orator, theologian, or student.  Yet, like Chrysostom, he preached every Sunday, and often in the week besides, and his sermons had great power on his generation.  When he died in 397 he left behind him even a rich legacy of theological treatises, as well as some fervid, inspiring hymns, and an influence for the better in the modes of church music, which was the beginning of the modern development of that great element in public worship.  As a defender of the faith by his pen, he may have yielded to greater geniuses than he; but as the guardian of the interests of the Church, as a stalwart giant, who prostrated the kings of the earth before him and gained the first great battles of the spiritual over the temporal power, Ambrose is worthy to be ranked among the great Fathers, and will continue to receive the praises of enlightened Christendom.

AUTHORITIES.

Life of Ambrose, by his deacon, Paulinus; Theodoret; Tillemont’s Memoires Ecclesiastique, tom. x; Baronius; Zosimus; the Epistles of Ambrose; Butler’s Lives of the Saints; Biographie Universelle; Gibbon’s Decline and Fall.  Milman has only a very brief notice of this great bishop, the founder of sacerdotalism in the Latin Church.  Neander’s and the standard Church Histories.  There are some popular biographical sketches in the encyclopedias, but no classical history of this prelate, in English, with which I am acquainted.  The French writers are the best.