So Chrysostom was serene, even cheerful, amid the blasts of a cold and cheerless climate.  It was there he wrote those noble and interesting letters, of which two hundred and forty still remain.  Indeed, his influence seemed to increase with his absence from the capital; and this his enemies beheld with the rage which Napoleon felt for Madame de Stael when he had banished her to within forty leagues of Paris.  So a fresh order from the Government doomed him to a still more dreary solitude, on the utmost confines of the Roman Empire, on the coast of the Euxine, even the desert of Pityus.  But his feeble body could not sustain the fatigues of this second journey.  He was worn out with disease, labors, and austerities; and he died at Comono, in Pontus,—­near the place where Henry Martin died,—­in the sixtieth year of his age, a martyr, like greater men than he.

Nevertheless this martyrdom, and at the hands of a Christian emperor, filled the world with grief.  It was only equalled in intensity by the martyrdom of Becket in after ages.  The voice of envy was at last hushed; one of the greatest lights of the Church was extinguished forever.  Another generation, however, transported his remains to the banks of the Bosporus, and the emperor—­the second Theodosius—­himself advanced to receive them as far as Chalcedon, and devoutly kneeling before his coffin, even as Henry II. kneeled at the shrine of Becket, invoked the forgiveness of the departed saint for the injustice and injuries he had received.  His bones were interred with extraordinary pomp in the tomb of the apostles, and were afterwards removed to Rome, and deposited, still later, beneath a marble mausoleum in a chapel of Saint Peter, where they still remain.

Such were the life and death of the greatest pulpit orator of Christian antiquity.  And how can I describe his influence?  His sermons, indeed, remain; but since we have given up the Fathers to the Catholics, as if they had a better right to them than we, their writings are not so well known as they ought to be,—­as they will be, when we become broader in our views and more modest of our own attainments.  Few of the Protestant divines, whom we so justly honor, surpassed Chrysostom in the soundness of his theology, and in the learning with which he adorned his sermons.  Certainly no one of them has equalled him in his fervid, impassioned, and classic eloquence.  He belongs to the Church universal.  The great divines of the seventeenth century made him the subject of their admiring study.  In the Middle Ages he was one of the great lights of the reviving schools.  Jeremy Taylor, not less than Bossuet, acknowledged his matchless services.  One of his prayers has entered into the beautiful liturgy of Cranmer.  He was a Bernard, a Bourdaloue, and a Whitefield combined, speaking in the language of Pericles, and on themes which Paganism never comprehended and the Middle Ages but imperfectly discussed.