-which in short make it their boast that they are much more comfortable than that ancient creed which, together with joy, leads men to continual smiting on the breast, and prayers for pardon, and looking forward to the judgment-day, as to an event really to happen to themselves individually.

The following is Athanasius's account of the effect produced by Antony in Egypt, even in his lifetime; which, rhetorical as it may seem, is, after all, a correct representation of the visible change in the world wrought by his example, and affords a pleasing hope that, out of so much of outward manifestation, there was much of the substance of religion within.

"Among the mountains there were monasteries, as if tabernacles filled with divine choirs, singing, studying, fasting, praying, exulting in the hope of things to come, and working for almsdeeds, having love and harmony one towards another. And truly it was given one there to see a peculiar country of piety and righteousness. Neither injurer nor injured was there, nor chiding of the tax-collector; but a multitude of ascetics, whose one feeling was towards holiness. So that a stranger, seeing the monasteries and their order, would be led to cry out, 'How beauteous are thy homes, O Jacob, and thy tabernacles, O Israel; as shady groves, as a garden on a river, as tents which the Lord has pitched, and as cedars by the waters." "—§ 44.

I cannot conclude more appropriately than by Herbert's lines on the subject. Speaking of Religion he says:

"To Egypt first she came; where they did prove
Wonders of anger once, but now of love.

The Ten Commandments there did flourish, more
Than the ten bitter plagues had done before.
Holy Macarius and great Antony

Made Pharaoh, Moses; changing the history.
Goshen was darkness; Egypt, full of lights;
Nilus, for monsters, brought forth Israelites.
Such power hath mighty baptism to produce,
For things misshapen, things of highest use.
How dear to me, O God, thy counsels are!
Who may with thee compare?"

Church Militant.—v. 37, 38.

Chapter xx

Martin, the Apostle of Gaul

"Gird Thee with Thy sword upon Thy thigh, O Thou Most Mighty, according to Thy worship and renown; good luck have Thou with Thine honour; ride on because of the word of truth, of meekness, and righteousness; and Thy right hand shall teach Thee terrible things."

THO has not heard of St. Martin, Bishop of Tours,

and Confessor? In our part of the world at least he is well known, as far as name goes, by the churches dedicated to him. Even from British times a church has existed under his tutelage in the afterwards metropolitan city of Canterbury; though we know little or nothing of churches to St. Ambrose, St. Augustine, St. Jerome, St. Basil, or St. Athanasius. Considering how many of our temples are called after the Apostles, and how many of them piously preserve the earthly name of those who almost "have no remembrance, and are as if they had not been," as St. George, or St. Nicolas; it is a peculiarity in St. Martin's history that he should at once be so well known and so widely venerated; renowned in this life yet honoured after it. And such honour has been paid him from the first. He died in the last years of the fourth century; his successor at Tours built a chapel over his tomb in that city; St. Perpetuus, another successor, about 70 years afterwards, built a church and conveyed his relics thither. In the course of another 70 years his name had taken up its abode in Canterbury, where it remains. Soon after a church was dedicated to him at Rome, and soon after in Spain. He alone of the Confessors had a service of his own in the more ancient breviaries; he is named

too in the mass service of Pope Gregory,—which commemorates, after St. Mary and the Apostles, "Linus, Cletus, Clement, Sextus, Cornelius, Cyprian, Laurence, Chrysostom, John and Paul, Cosmas and Damian, Hilary, Martin, Augustine, Gregory, Jerome, Benedict, and all Saints."

I am not going to present the reader with more than a slight sketch of his history, which we have received on very authentic testimony, as in the case of St. Antony, though St. Martin like him has left no writings behind him. Nay, perhaps more so, for the biographer of St. Martin is not merely a friend, who sometimes saw him, though a great authority in himself, but a disciple, and intimate, and eyewitness, as well as a man of cultivated and classical mind,-Sulpicius Severus, who wrote his memoir even while the subject of it was alive, and while his memory was fresh.

Martin was born about the year 316, in Pannonia, in a town which now forms part of Hungary; his father was a pagan, and had risen from the ranks to the command of a cohort. A soldier has no home, and his son was brought up at Pavia in North Italy with very little education. What influenced Martin is not known; but at the age of ten he fled to the Church against the wish of his parents, and enrolled himself as a catechumen. Under these first impressions, he formed the desire of retiring to the desert as a solitary; however, things do not happen here below after our wishes; so at fifteen, he was seized, upon his father's instance, and enlisted in the army. In consequence, he remained a soldier five years, and was sent into Gaul. It is recorded of him, that at a time when he was stationed at Amiens, being then eighteen, he encountered at the gate of the city a poor man without clothes. It was mid-winter, and the weather more than ordinarily severe; he had nothing on him but his single military cloak and his arms. youth took his sword, cut the cloak in two, and gave half to the beggar. The bystanders jeered or admired, according to their turn of mind; and he went away. Next night he had a dream: he saw our Lord clad in the half cloak which he had bestowed on the poor man. Christ commanded his notice, and then said to the

The

Angels who stood around, "Martin, yet a catechumen, hath wrapped me in this garment." On this Martin proceeded forthwith to baptism, and two years afterwards left the army.

He then had recourse to the celebrated St. Hilary, who was afterwards bishop of Poictiers, and an illustrious confessor in the Arian troubles. Martin, however, was destined to precede him in suffering, and that in the same holy cause. He undertook a visit to his parents, who now seem to have retired into Pannonia, with a view to their conversion. When he was in the passes of the Alps he fell in with bandits. Sulpicius gives this account of what happened:-" One of them raised an axe and aimed it at his head, but another intercepted the blow. However, his hands were bound behind him, and he was given in custody to one of them for plunder. This man took him aside, and began to ask him who he was. He answered, 'A Christian.' He then inquired whether he felt afraid. He avowed, without wavering, that he never felt so much at ease, being confident that the Lord's mercy would be specially with him in temptations; rather he felt sorry for him, who, living by robbery, was unworthy of the mercy of Christ. Entering, then, on the subject of the Gospel, he preached the Word of God to him. To be brief, the robber believed, attended on him, and set him on his way, begging his prayers. This man afterwards was seen in the profession of religion; so that the above narrative is given as he was heard to state it.”— Vit. M. c. 4.

He gained his mother, but his father persisted in paganism. At this time Illyricum was almost given over to Arianism. He did not scruple to confess the orthodox doctrine there, was seized, beaten with rods publicly, and cast out of the city. Little, however, is known of these years of his life. Driven from Illyricum, he betook himself to Milan, A.D. 356, when he was about forty years old. Here he lived several years in solitude, till he was again driven out by the Arian bishop Auxentius. On leaving Hilary, he had promised to return to him; and now Hilary being restored from exile, he kept his word, after a separation of about nine or ten years. He came to Poictiers, and formed in the neighbourhood the first

monastic establishment which is known to have existed in France.

St. Martin is famous for his alleged miraculous power. Sulpicius's memoir is full of accounts of miracles wrought by him. He is even said to have raised the dead. I cannot deny that a chance reader would regard his life merely as an early specimen of demonology. Whether the works attributed to him were really miracles, and whether they really took place, I leave to the private judgment of each reader of them. What has been said in former chapters applies here; it is difficult often to draw the line between real and apparent interruptions of the course of nature; and, in an age of miracles, ordinary events will be exaggerated into supernatural ; veneration, too, for an individual, will, at such a time, occasion the ordinary effects of his sagacity or presence of mind to be accounted more than human.

He was made bishop of Tours in the year 372, about the time that Ambrose and Basil were raised to their respective sees, and that Athanasius died. There were parties who opposed Martin's election, alleging, as Sulpicius tells us, that "he was a contemptible person, unworthy of the episcopate, despicable in countenance, mean in dress, rough in his hair." Such were the outward signs of a monk; and a monk he did not cease to be after he had become a bishop. Indeed, as far as was possible, he wished to be still just what he had been, and looked back to the period of his life when he was a private man, as a time when he was more sensibly favoured with divine power than afterwards. Sulpicius thus speaks of him in his episcopate :

"He remained just what he was before; with the same humbleness of heart, the same meanness of dress, and with a fulness of authority and grace which responded to the dignity of a bishop without infringing on the rule and the virtue of a monk. For a while he lived in a cell built on to the church; but, unable to bear the interruptions of visitors, he made himself a monastery about two miles out of the city. So secret and retired was the place, that he did not miss the solitude of the desert. On one side it was bounded by the high and precipitous