I need not enumerate his measures and acts.  Like all great and patriotic statesmen he selected the wisest and ablest men he could find as subordinates, and condescended himself to those details which he inexorably exacted from others.  He even mounted the neglected pulpit of his metropolitan church to preach to the people, like Chrysostom and Gregory Nazianzen at Constantinople.  His sermons are not models of eloquence or style, but are practical, powerful, earnest, and orthodox.  Athanasius himself was not more evangelical, or Ambrose more impressive.  He was the especial foe of all the heresies which characterized the age.  He did battle with all who attempted to subvert the Nicene Creed.  Those whom he especially rebuked were the Manicheans,—­men who made the greatest pretension to intellectual culture and advanced knowledge, and yet whose lives were disgraced not merely by the most offensive intellectual pride, but the most disgraceful vices; men who confounded all the principles of moral obligation, and who polluted even the atmosphere of Rome by downright Pagan licentiousness.  He had no patience with these false philosophers, and he had no mercy.  He even complained of them to the emperor, as Calvin did of Servetus to the civil authorities of Geneva (which I grant was not to his credit); and the result was that these dissolute and pretentious heretics were expelled from the army and from all places of trust and emolument.

Many people in our enlightened times would denounce this treatment as illiberal and persecuting, and justly.  But consider his age and circumstances.  What was Leo to do as the guardian of the faith in those dreadful times?  Was he to suffer those who poisoned all the sources of renovation which then remained to go unrebuked and unpunished?  He may have said, in his defence, “Shall I, the bishop of this diocese, the appointed guardian of faith and morals in a period of alarming degeneracy,—­shall I, armed with the sword of Saint Peter, stop to draw the line between injuries inflicted by the tongue and injuries inflicted by the hand?  Shall we defend our persons, our property, and our lives, and take no notice of those who impiously and deliberately would destroy our souls by their envenomed blasphemies?  Shall we allow the wells of water which spring up to everlasting life to be poisoned by the impious atheists and scoffers, who in every age set themselves up against Christ and His kingdom, and are only allowed by God Almighty to live, as the wild beasts of the desert or scorpions and serpents are allowed to live?  Let them live, but let us defend ourselves against their teeth and fangs.  Are the overseers of God’s people, in a world of shame, to be mere philosophical Gallios, indifferent to our higher interests?  Is it a Christian duty to permit an avalanche of evils to overwhelm the Church on the plea of toleration?  Shall we suffer, when we have the power to prevent it, a pandemonium of scoffers and infidels and sentimental