whole city. I prayed God that I might not survive the ruin, which might ensue, of such a place; nay, of Italy itself. I shrunk from the odium of having occasioned slaughter, and would sooner have given my own throat to the knife. . . . Presently they bade me calm the people. I replied, that all I could do was not to inflame them; but God alone could appease them. For myself, if I appeared to have instigated them, it was the duty of the government to proceed against me, or to banish me. Upon this they left me.'

Ambrose spent the rest of Palm Sunday in the same Basilica in which he had been officiating in the morning : at night he went to his own house, that the civil power might have the opportunity of arresting him if it was thought advisable.

The attempt to gain the Portian seems now to have been dropped; but on the Wednesday troops were marched before day-break to take possession of the New Church, which was within the walls. Ambrose, upon the news of this fresh movement, used the weapons of an apostle. He did not seek to disturb them in their possession; but, attending service at his own church, he was content to threaten the soldiers with a sentence of excommunication. Meanwhile the New Church, where the soldiers were posted, began to fill with a larger congregation than it ever contained before the persecution. Ambrose was requested to go thither, but, desirous of drawing the people away from the scene of imperial tyranny, lest a riot should ensue, he remained in the Portian, and began a comment on the lesson of the day, which was from the book of Job. First, he commended them for the Christian patience and resignation with. which they had hitherto borne their trial, which indeed was, on the whole, surprising, considering the usual inflammable nature of a multitude. "We petition your majesty," they said to the emperor; we use no force,

we feel no fear, but we petition." It is common in the leader of a multitude to profess peaceableness, but very unusual for the multitude itself to persevere in doing so. Ambrose went on to observe, that both they and he had in their way been tempted, as Job was, by the powers of

evil. For himself, his peculiar trial had lain in the reflection that the extraordinary measures of the government, the movements of the Gothic guards, the fines of the tradesmen, the various sufferings of the saints, all arose from what might be considered his obstinacy in not yielding to what seemed an overwhelming necessity, and giving the Basilica to the Arians. Yet he felt that to do so would be to peril his soul; so that the request was but the voice of the tempter, as he spoke in Job's wife, to make him "say a word against God, and die," to betray his trust, and incur the sentence of spiritual death.

Before this time the soldiers who had been sent to the New Church, from dread of the threat of excommunication, had declared against the sacrilege, and joined his congregation at the Portian; and now the news came that the royal hangings had been taken down. Soon after, as he was continuing his address to the people, a fresh message came to him from the court, to ask him, whether he had an intention of domineering over his sovereign? Ambrose, in answer, showed the pains he had taken to observe a passive obedience to the emperor's will, and to hinder disturbance: then he added

"Priests have by old right bestowed sovereignty, never assumed it; and it is a common saying, that sovereigns have coveted the priesthood more than priests the sovereignty. Christ hid Himself, lest He should be made a king. Yes! we have a dominion of our own. The dominion of the priest lies in his helplessness, as it is said, 'When I am weak, then am I strong.""

And so ended the dispute for a time. On Good Friday the court gave way; the guards were ordered from the Basilica, and the fines were remitted. I end for the present with the view which Ambrose took of the prospect before him :

"Thus the matter rests; I wish I could say, has ended: but the emperor's words are of that angry sort which shows that a more severe contest is in store. He

calls me a tyrant, or what is worse still. He implied this when his ministers were entreating him, on the petition of the soldiers, to attend Church. 'Should Ambrose bid you,' he made answer, 'doubtless you would give me to him in chains.' I leave you to judge what these words promise. Persons present were all shocked at hearing them; but there are parties who exasperate him."

Chapter it

Ambrose and Valentinian

"Look unto Zion, the city of our solemnities: thine eyes shall see Jerusalem a quiet habitation, a tabernacle that shall not be taken down: not one of the stakes thereof shall ever be removed, neither shall any of the cords thereof be broken."

IN the opposition which Ambrose made to the Arians, as already related, there is no appearance of his appealing to any law of the empire in justification of his refusal to surrender the Basilica to them. He rested it upon the simple basis of the Divine law, a commonsense argument which there was no evading. "The Basilica has been made over to Christ; the Church is His trustee; I am its ruler. I dare not alienate the Lord's property. He who does so, does it at his peril." Indeed he elsewhere expressly repudiates the principle of dependence on human law. "Law," he says, "has not brought the Church together, but the faith of Christ." However, Justina determined to have human law on her side. She persuaded her son to make it a capital offence in any one, either publicly or privately, even by petition, to interfere with the assemblies of the Arians; a provision which admitted a fair, and might also bear, and did in fact receive, a most tyrannical interpretation. Benevolus, the secretary of state, from whose office the edict was to proceed, refused to draw it up, and resigned his place; but of course others less scrupulous were easily found to succeed him. At length it was promulgated on the 21st of January of the next year, A.D. 386, and a fresh attempt soon followed on the part of the court to get possession of the Portian Basilica, which was without the walls.

The line of conduct which Ambrose had adopted remained equally clear and straight, whether before or after the promulgation of this edict. It was his duty to use all the means which Christ has given the Church to prevent the profanation of the Basilica. But soon a new question arose for his determination. An imperial message was brought him to retire from the city at once, with any friends who chose to attend him. It is not certain whether this was intended as an absolute command, or (as his words rather imply) a recommendation on the part of government to save themselves the odium, and him the suffering, of public and more severe proceedings. Even if it were the former, it does not appear that a Christian bishop, so circumstanced, need obey it; for what was it but in other words to say, "Depart from the Basilica, and leave it us"?—the very order which he had already withstood. The words of Scripture, which bid Christians, if persecuted in one city, flee to another, are evidently, from the form of them, a discretionary rule, grounded on the expediency of each occasion, as it arises. A mere threat is not a persecution, nor is a command; and, though we are bound to obey our civil rulers, the welfare of the Church has a prior claim upon our obedience. Other bishops took the same view of the case with Ambrose; and, accordingly, he determined to stay in Milan till removed by main force, or cut off by violence. The reader shall hear his own words in a sermon which he delivered upon the occasion :—

"I see what is unusual with you, that you are under a sudden excitement, and are turning your eyes on me. What can be the reason of this? Is it that you saw or heard that an imperial message has been brought to me by the tribunes desiring me to depart hence whither I would, and to take with me all who would follow me? What! did you fear that I would desert the Church, and, for fear of my life, abandon you? Yet you might have attended to my answer. I said that I could not, for an instant, entertain the thought of deserting the Church, in that I feared the Lord of all more than the emperor of the day in truth, that, should force hurry me off, it would be my body, not my mind, which suffered the