an accomplished education as great an ornament to a Christian gentleman as were the good principles she had instilled a support in dangerous temptation.  Her son John—­for that was his baptismal and only name—­was trained in all the learning of the schools, and, like so many of the illustrious of our world, made in his youth a wonderful proficiency.  He was precocious, like Cicero, like Abelard, like Pascal, like Pitt, like Macaulay, and Stuart Mill; and like them he panted for distinction and fame.  The most common path to greatness for high-born youth, then as now, was the profession of the law.  But the practice of this honorable profession did not, unfortunately, at least in Antioch, correspond with its theory.  Chrysostom (as we will call him, though he did not receive this appellation until some centuries after his death) was soon disgusted and disappointed with the ordinary avocations of the Forum,—­its low standard of virtue, and its diversion of what is ennobling in the pure fountains of natural justice into the turbid and polluted channels of deceit, chicanery, and fraud; its abandonment to usurious calculations and tricks of learned and legalized jugglery, by which the end of law itself was baffled and its advocates alone enriched.  But what else could be expected of lawyers in those days and in that wicked city, or even in any city of the whole Empire, when justice was practically a marketable commodity; when one half of the whole population were slaves; when the circus and the theatre were as necessary as the bath; when only the rich and fortunate were held in honor; when provincial governments were sold to the highest bidder; when effeminate favorites were the grand chamberlains of emperors; when fanatical mobs rendered all order a mockery; when the greed for money was the master passion of the people; when utility was the watchword of philosophy, and material gains the end and object of education; when public misfortunes were treated with the levity of atheistic science; when private sorrows, miseries, and sufferings had no retreat and no shelter; when conjugal infelicities were scarcely a reproach; when divorces were granted on the most frivolous pretexts; when men became monks from despair of finding women of virtue for wives; and when everything indicated a rapid approach of some grand catastrophe which should mingle, in indiscriminate ruin, the masters and the slaves of a corrupt and prostrate world?

Such was society, and such the signs of the times, when Chrysostom began the practice of the law at Antioch,—­perhaps the wickedest city of the whole Empire.  His eyes speedily were opened.  He could not sleep, for grief and disgust; he could not embark on a profession which then, at least, added to the evils it professed to cure; he began to tremble for his higher interests; he abandoned the Forum forever; he fled as from a city of destruction; he sought solitude, meditation, and prayer, and joined those monks who lived in cells,