its decline, it was natural that the protest against these evils should assume the greatest outward antagonism.  Luxury and a worldly life were deemed utterly inconsistent with a preacher of righteousness, and were disdained with haughty scorn by the prophets of the Lord, as they were by Elijah and Elisha in the days of Ahab.  “What went ye out in the wilderness to see?” said our Lord, with disdainful irony,—­“a man clothed in soft raiment?  They that wear soft clothing are in king’s houses,”—­as much as to say, My prophets, my ministers, rejoice not in such things.

So Chrysostom could never forget that he was a minister of Christ, and was willing to forego the trappings and pleasures of material life sooner than abdicate his position as a spiritual dictator.  The secular historians of our day would call him arrogant, like the courtiers of Arcadius, who detested his plain speaking and his austere piety; but the poor and unimportant thought him as humble as the rich and great thought him proud.  Moreover, he was a foe to idleness, and sent away from court to their distant sees a host of bishops who wished to bask in the sunshine of court favor, or revel in the excitements of a great city; and they became his enemies.  He deposed others for simony, and they became still more hostile.  Others again complained that he was inhospitable, since he would not give up his time to everybody, even while he scattered his revenues to the poor.  And still others entertained towards him the passion of envy,—­that which gives rancor to the odium theologicum, that fatal passion which caused Daniel to be cast into the lions’ den, and Haman to plot the ruin of Mordecai; a passion which turns beautiful women into serpents, and learned theologians into fiends.  So that even Chrysostom was assailed with danger.  Even he was not too high to fall.

The first to turn against the archbishop was the Lord High Chamberlain,—­Eutropius,—­the minister who had brought him to Constantinople.  This vulgar-minded man expected to find in the preacher he had elevated a flatterer and a tool.  He was as much deceived as was Henry II. when he made Thomas a Becket archbishop of Canterbury.  The rigid and fearless metropolitan, instead of telling stories at his table and winking at his infamies, openly rebuked his extortions and exposed his robberies.  The disappointed minister of Arcadius then bent his energies to compass the ruin of the prelate; but, before he could effect his purpose, he was himself disgraced at court.  The army in revolt had demanded his head, and Eutropius fled to the metropolitan church of Saint Sophia.  Chrysostom seized the occasion to impress his hearers with the instability of human greatness, and preached a sort of funeral oration for the man before he was dead.  As the fallen and wretched minister of the emperor lay crouching in an agony of shame and fear beneath the table of the altar, the preacher burst out:  “Oh, vanity of vanities, where is now the glory of this