noble birth.  Yet being forced, as it were, to accept what he did not seek or perhaps desire, he resolved to be true to himself and his master.  Scarcely was he consecrated by Theophilus of Alexandria before he launched out his indignant invectives against the patron who had elevated him, the court which admired him, and the imperial family which sustained him.  Still the preacher, when raised to the government of the Eastern church, regarding his sphere in the pulpit as the loftiest which mortal genius could fill.  He feared no one, and he spared no one.  None could rob a man who had parted with a princely fortune for the sake of Christ; none could bribe a man who had no favors to ask, and who could live on a crust of bread; none could silence a man who felt himself to be the minister of divine Omnipotence, and who scattered before his altar the dust of worldly grandeur.

It seems that Chrysostom regarded his first duty, even as the Metropolitan of the East, to preach the gospel.  He subordinated the bishop to the preacher.  True, he was the almoner of his church and the director of its revenues; but he felt that the church of Christ had a higher vocation for a bishop to fill than to be a good business man.  Amid all the distractions of his great office he preached as often and as fervently as he did at Antioch.  Though possessed of enormous revenues, he curtailed the expenses of his household, and surrounded himself with the pious and the learned.  He lived retired within his palace; he dined alone on simple food, and always at home.  The great were displeased that he would not honor with his presence their sumptuous banquets; but rich dinners did not agree with his weak digestion, and perhaps he valued too highly his precious time to waste himself, body and soul, for the enjoyment of even admiring courtiers.  His power was not at the dinner-table but in the pulpit, and he feared to weaken the effects of his discourses by the exhibition of weaknesses which nearly every man displays amid the excitements of social intercourse.

Perhaps, however, Chrysostom was too ascetic.  Christ dined with publicans and sinners; and a man must unbend somewhere, or he loses the elasticity of his mind, and becomes a formula or a mechanism.  The convivial enjoyments of Luther enabled him to bear his burden.  Had Thomas a Becket shown the same humanity as archbishop that he did as chancellor, he might not have quarrelled with his royal master.  So Chrysostom might have retained his favor with the court and his see until he died, had he been less austere and censorious.  Yet we should remember that the asceticism which is so repulsive to us, and with reason, and which marked the illustrious saints of the fourth century, was simply the protest against the almost universal materialism of the day,—­that dreadful moral blight which was undermining society.  As luxury and extravagance and material pleasures were the prominent evils of the old Roman world in