The Latin Hymn-writers and Their Hymns

by Samuel Willoughby Duffield

INTRODUCTION.

The study of the Latin hymns is so much a thing of its own kind that one owes it to himself as well as to his readers to begin at the beginning. This beginning in the present instance happened to be on the North River, on a bright, fresh April morning in the year of grace 1882. It was at that time, with the clear sky overhead and the hearty breeze coming full in our faces from the Narrows, that my friend, the Rev. F. N. Zabriskie, D.D., broached the following proposition:

It was, he said, a matter of great surprise to him that no one had done for the Latin hymn-writers what had been done for those of later date. We had their hymns, but for his part he confessed to a love for the personality of the poets themselves, and for the circumstances which conspired to produce their poems. Now, if it seemed good to myself, who had already given time and study to the hymns, he would gladly open the columns of the Christian Intelligencer (the organ of the Reformed Church in America) to a series of articles bearing such a character. And there and then the book began.

But my original ideas modified greatly as I went on. In place of my mastering the subject, the subject mastered me. My previous studies went for but very little, and my confidence in my ability to prepare the articles without taking much time from regular and important duties diminished with every number. I found myself on new ground and was perpetually referred back to the original authorities. French and German and Latin—I had to investigate them all in order to satisfy that insatiate creature, a scholar’s conscience. I discovered that, except for rare and slight notices, this sort of work had neither been done nor was likely to be done, and conferences with our best hymnologists only made me more interested in doing it, and doing it as well as I could. Doubtless those whose specialities lie in mediaeval days will find much to criticise, but no one can be a severer critic than myself according to my means of information.

These chapters, like this Introduction, will be found to be written in the American language. Their purpose is to reach the popular desire for better knowledge, and it would be absurd to offer these facts in any dry or pedantic style. Yet the scholar and the hymnologist will both find that a positive value and a careful accuracy attach to the work that has been done. I found I could take nothing for granted, and I took nothing for granted. Even the Archbishop of Dublin and the principal of Sackville College have their idiosyncrasies and predilections, and a quite easy way of writing on these topics is to copy what has been said already. A very notable case to the contrary is Lord Selborne’s splendid article on “Hymns” in the new Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Therefore life and song and color are not absent, I trust, from these pages. I should not like to give all the authorities consulted or rummaged through; for, indeed, I have kept no record of them. Like the famous sun-dial I have registered none but the serene hours, and many a time the scarce and long-sought volume before me has been jejune enough. While, on the other hand, a book like Morison’s Life of St. Bernard has turned out to be precisely the help I was seeking, bright in its style and careful and original in its researches. I have verified its quotations too often not to pay it at least this faint tribute of approval.

It would be also beyond measure ungrateful in me if I did not here acknowledge the kindnesses I have received in this quest after the Sangreal of a true psalmody. Let me name, then, the Astor Library. Its superintendent, Mr. Little, and its librarians, Mr. Frederick Saunders (author of Evenings with the Sacred Poets), and his assistant, Mr. Bierstadt, have been uniformly courteous and obliging. So has been the Rev. Professor Charles A. Briggs, D.D., in whose care is the fine theological library of Union Seminary. So have been the authorities of the Society Library (New York), and of the Philadelphia Library, and of the Boston Athenaeum and Public libraries.

Personally, I am deeply indebted to the culture and friendship of Miss Marion L. Pelton, Assistant Professor of Literature in Wellesley College, who has made for me many valuable notes; and to the assistance and counsel of Professor F. A. March, LL.D., Professor F. M. Bird, Professor Philip Schaff, D.D., and Judge W. H. Arnoux.

It will be readily seen that I have not concerned myself with the matter of the host of English translations, or with that of the comparison and criticism of the text of the hymns. These branches of hymnology are in a scientific sense the most valuable, but in a popular sense they are the least interesting. And I could not hope to rival, far less to equal, such illustrious scholarship as that of Daniel or Mone. I have therefore been content to pipe to a lesser reed, and in a more familiar and gossiping way to attempt the history of the hymns. And for the rest I can only add what Master Robert Burton saith in his Anatomy of Melancholy: “If through weakness, folly, passion, ignorance, I have said amiss, let it be forgotten and forgiven.... I earnestly request every private man, as Scaliger did Cardan, not to take offence.... If thou knewest my modesty and simplicity, thou wouldest easily pardon and forgive what is here amiss, or by thee misconceived.”

Samuel Willoughby Duffield.

Bloomfield, N. J., U. S. A.

LATIN HYMNS.

CHAPTER I.
THE PRAISE SERVICE OF THE EARLY CHURCH.

When our Lord and His disciples “had sung an hymn” they left the place where they had observed the passover, and went out to the Mount of Olives. This hymn was the “Great Hallel,” consisting of Psalms 113 to 118 inclusive. The 113th and 114th were sung previous to the feast; the others, after it. We thus know, with singular accuracy, what was the first hymn of praise in the Christian Church. The essence of this “Hallel” is the essence of all true psalmody—trust and thanksgiving and praise.

It may be said, and with truth, that the Magnificat of Mary, the Nunc Dimittis of old Simeon, and, above all, that the Gloria in Excelsis Deo of the angels at Bethlehem, antedate this hymn of our Lord and His apostles. It may also be said, and with the same truth, that these furnished to the early Christians their earliest expressions of praise. But it appears that the Last Supper, with its pathetic union of Jewish and Christian ideas, was also the place at which the Psalms of David and the spiritual songs of primitive Christianity were united. The thought that this reveals is larger than these limits will permit us to discuss. It is in brief that as Jesus Christ came, “not to destroy, but to fulfil,” He designed to show to His Church that gratitude, love, trust, and adoration were to be combined in all future psalmody. The t’hillim of the Jew were to become the hymni of the Christian.

The noticeable fact remains that the early Church only caught the simplest and most fervent forms of this worship. Their pure veneration of the Lord led Pliny to write (Ep. 10:97) that they “sung alternately among themselves a hymn to Christ as God”—carmen Christo quasi Deo, dicere secum invicem. It is this loving devotion which charms us as we read those verses which have been preserved. For the most part the subjects are limited. We could naturally expect that, being largely drawn from Jewish sources, they would express gratitude and adoration—and this is correct. Chrysostom declared that the early Christians sung at prayers in the morning, at their work, and very usually at their meals. Jerome, writing to Marcellus, says—and we quote Cave’s translation for its quaintness—“You could not go into the field but you might hear the Ploughman at his Hallelujahs, the Mower at his Hymns, and the Vine-dresser singing David’s Psalms.” In fact, Christian song was a notable feature of primitive Christianity.

The language of these hymns was either Syriac or Greek. By degrees the Greek obtained the precedence; and as the Latin hymns did not arise until Hilary of Poitiers (fourth century), the period between the Ascension and that era belongs to the Greek language rather more than to any other. We also know from the New Testament writers some very important facts, which may properly be classified at this point.

1. There were three terms for the sacred song. It might be a psalm, or a hymn, or a spiritual song, as we discover from Ephesians 5:19 and Colossians 3:16.

2. From 1 Corinthians 14:23-33, it seems plain that the composition, as well as the singing of these hymns and songs, might be the result of sudden emotion or inspiration. In any case, there is no doubt (for Tertullian decisively states it) that the “extempore,” or, more strictly, “private” authorship of such psalmody was not uncommon. The council of Laodicea (circa A.D. 360) interdicted private persons from this privilege. Even in Paul’s time it would appear to have produced an effect akin to the “spirituals” of our own freedmen—much of it being exquisite in its simple devotion, while a certain share offended good taste, and hindered the propriety and solemnity of worship.

3. The alternation of prayer with praise was never better illustrated than when Paul and Silas (Acts 16:25) sent up their midnight anthems from that “inner prison,” while their feet were “made fast in the stocks.” This alternation was—as the Fathers assure us—the order in public worship also.

4. We have received in the very pages of the New Testament some of these earliest hymns. To say nothing, at present, of those great leading chants which bear the names of the angels, and of Mary, and of Zacharias, and of Simeon—and to pass over all those of Jewish origin—we have still left us such a strain as that in Acts 4:24-30. Here we have an impulse which expresses itself in reply to Peter and John by sacred song.

Ephesians 5:14 has also been considered to be such a fragment:

“Awake, O thou that sleepest!

Arouse thee from the dead!

And Christ shall give to thee

Enlightenment!”

So too 1 Timothy 3:16 has been arranged by some scholars as though it were a well-known strophe the Apostle quoted:

“Who—for the mystery is great—

Was manifest in body,

Was justified in spirit,

Was visible to angels,

Was heralded to heathen,

Was trusted on the earth,

Was taken up to glory.”

Nor is this the only instance in this very Epistle, for 1 Timothy 6:15, 16, reads:

“The king of all the kingly ones,

The lord of all the lordly ones,

Who only hath the power of life immortal;

Inhabiting the unapproachable light;

Whom never any one of men hath seen,

Nor ever can behold;

Let glory and eternal strength be his!

Amen!”

5. When, now, we complete our New Testament mention of this praise—which clings like incense to the temple-curtains and sweetly perfumes the place—we have only to add the earliest received anthems. These are the Magnificat (Luke 1:46-55); the Benedictus (Luke 1:68-79); the Gloria in Excelsis Deo (Luke 2:18); and the Nunc Dimittis (Luke 2:29-32). It will be observed that all these are derived from a single gospel, wherein, more than in any other, the “sweet, sad music of humanity” can most readily be found. It is natural, too, that the painter and physician, Luke, should have a poetic ear which could catch—as in the Acts of the Apostles—this faintest and earliest praise. There were, indeed, in the primitive church, eight of these classic expressions of worship. These are:

(1) The Lesser Doxology (Gloria Patri), “Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost.” (2) The Greater Doxology (Gloria in Excelsis), “Glory be to God on high, and on earth peace,” etc. [This was also called the Angelical Hymn.] (3) The Ter Sanctus (the cherubical hymn), “Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty.” (4) The Hallelujah. [This “Alleluia, Amen!” was the response of the church.] (5) The Evening Hymn (containing the Nunc Dimittis). (6) The Benedicite. [The “Song of the Three Children,” which is taken from the Apocrypha, and which appears in the service of the Episcopal Church (Order for Morning Prayer) as, “O all ye works of the Lord,” etc.] (7) The Magnificat. [Named—as these are all named—from the first word of the Latin Vulgate version.] (8) The Te Deum, “We praise Thee, O God, we acknowledge Thee to be the Lord,” etc.

We can feel quite sure that the Latin Church merely borrowed these hymns from the earliest forms of the Greek. The Te Deum was probably translated from that language, either by Hilary of Poitiers or by an unknown author of that date. It is, undoubtedly, a close rendering of many phrases and expressions which are common to the Greek hymns, and, if the learned hymnologist H. A. Daniel is to be credited (Thesaurus Hymnologicus II. 289), it is a real and literal translation of an actual chant of praise of great antiquity. His words are these: “To give you my opinion briefly, the Te Deum, equally with the Angelic Hymn (to which it is very similar in form and expression), was born in the Eastern Church, whence it has been translated into the Latin tongue.” He then proceeds to cite an ancient Greek hymn, five lines of which are exact with the Latin.

In 2 Timothy 2:11-13 the “faithful saying” has been interpreted to be a similar quotation from one of these ancient hymns:

“For if we are dead together,

We shall live together;

If we serve together,

We shall reign together;

If we should deny Him,

He will deny us too;

If we should be faithless,

He is faithful still.”

It does not, of course, absolutely follow that these are really such fragments of hymns as scholars have supposed. The late Dr. Lyman Coleman—a man of great practical good judgment—comments upon these citations thus:

“The argument is not conclusive; and all the learned criticism, the talent, and the taste, that have been employed on this point, leave us little else than uncertain conjecture on which to build an hypothesis.” (Primitive Church, p. 366.) Yet the latest scholarship tends so strongly in this direction, and the internal evidence is so good and fair, that it may be regarded as pretty well affirmed and accepted. No one, for example, would think of comparing such passages as these with the antithetic prose of Romans 3:21-23; or with the magnificent unrhythmic utterance in Romans 8:38, 39; or with the careful particularity of 2 Corinthians 6:4-10. They are seen and felt to be different both in tone and in form.

In the Apocalypse, where the language is naturally exalted and poetic, several such instances have been noted. They are: Revelation 1:4-8; 5:9, 10, 12-14; 11:15, 17, 18; 15:3, 4; 21:10-14, and 22:17. Of one of these—the “Song of Moses and of the Lamb”—we may be reasonably certain:

“Great are Thy works and strange,

Lord God, Thou Ruler of all!

And just are Thy ways, and true,

Thou King of the nations of earth.

For who shall not fear Thee, Lord,

And give to Thy name the praise,

For holy art Thou alone!—

To Thee shall the nations come

And worship before Thy face;

For all of Thy righteous acts

Shall then be openly known!”

In the same manner may be written the stanza from Revelation 22:17:

“And the Spirit and the Bride—

Are saying, ‘Come!’

And he that heareth—

Let him say, ‘Come!’

And he that thirsteth—

Let him come!

And he that willeth—

Let him receive,

Freely, the water of life!”

We have also a positive acquaintance with the order of religious worship in the early Church, dating back one hardly knows how far, but definitely leading us into the custom of the first three centuries. Public services began, and were continued, as follows:

First, Prayer—or, possibly, a Salutation or Invocation, such as is in common use to-day.

Then the Reading of Scripture. The Old Testament and New Testament were both employed: the one being expounded to apply to the case of the Christian Church; and the other for her comfort, encouragement, and edification.

Then followed the Hymns and Psalms. The distinction appears to have been that the psalms were those of David; the hymns, such as the song of Mary, or of the angels; and the spiritual songs, such as were composed by private persons, or which sprang up spontaneously in a kind of chant. That this was liable to abuse, and might cause confusion, is made evident by Paul’s advice to the Corinthians. Between these acts of praise was interpolated some brief Scripture lesson. And, very likely, a considerable portion of time was taken up by this part of the service.

Then came the Sermon, which was succeeded by a Prayer.

Another question now meets us, and one of some importance: Did the early Christians employ any musical instruments? In reply, it can be noted that ψάλλειν, “to make melody” (Eph.5:19), is usually taken to refer to a musical accompaniment. In Romans 15:9 it is a quotation from Psalm 18:50, where it means, “I will sing psalms.” In 1 Corinthians 15:15 (“I will sing with the spirit, and I will sing with the understanding also”) and in James 5:13 (“Is any merry? let him sing psalms”) we have nothing decisive except that we know that the Jewish method of “singing psalms” was to the accompaniment of musical instruments. Thus, with all these texts before us, we are not able either to affirm or deny the fact. The reference of Paul (1 Cor. 14:7) to the pipe (αυλός, flute) and harp (κιθάρα, lute) gives us no assistance. The “harp” of Revelation 5:8, 14:2, and 15:2, is the cithara or lute again; but neither does this tell us what the early Christians did or did not do. The inference is pretty strong that they avoided some things that were Jewish—and instrumental music was a marked feature in the Jew’s worship—but it is plain that (as with the Sabbath question) there was a great deal of blending at the edges between the two dispensations. We are told, moreover, that the Syriac Church has always been rich in tunes, having fully two hundred and seventy-five, while the Greek was confined to about eight.

There is another fact which comes in just here, however, to explain what we would otherwise find it hard to unriddle. It is the matter of the very language of the hymns themselves.

When we observe the places where these fragments occur, or where singing in the church is mentioned, we find that the language naturally is Greek. No one doubts that Luke and the other New Testament writers employed the tongue which was the educated and flexible medium of conveying the loftiest truth; nor that Ephesians or Corinthians chanted in Greek. “The Greek tongue,” say Conybeare and Howson (St. Paul, 1:10), “became to the Christian more than it had been to the Roman or the Jew.” It lends itself most readily to that dithyrambic shape in which highly emotional natures could best express their praise. So the irregularity of the verse; its utter lack of metrical form (as Dr. Neale found when he examined eighteen quarto volumes of it), and its simplicity of diction, all combined to put the instrumental accompaniment aside. Perhaps there was a prejudice—as Archbishop Trench affirms—against a distinctively Jewish method. Perhaps there was a disposition in this, as in other matters where art had perverted the morals of men, to oppose whatever looked toward a possible laxity. Music and banqueting, music and luxury, music and profligacy, went together so much that the early Church reacted to the extreme of Puritanism—forgetting that her Lord and Master had often worshipped in the full-choired temple itself. In the catacombs, where every manner of ordinary symbol may be found, there is neither pipe nor harp, nor any sort of musical instrument—the lyre alone excepted. But neither is there any condescension to beauty in form or color. Everything betokens a rude, uncultivated simplicity—a piety which contented itself with the barest and meagerest representations. It rose high enough to portray the face of Christ, in the ancient cemetery of Domitilla, and in one carving on a sarcophagus of the fourth century. And, remembering how repugnant anything heathenish was to the souls of those who associated pipe and tabret and harp with the bloody arena and the wild revelry of Rome, can we doubt why they mingled only their unassisted voices in these chants of praise? It can be positively added that Ambrose, Basil, and Chrysostom do not include instrumental music in their eulogies of the Church’s practice upon this theme.

We are justified, however, in going one step beyond this bald statement, that the early Christians sang together. They sang secum invicem, alternately. The quotations already given show the adaptation of their hymns to this use. In this, at least, they were following the Jewish habit of responses and part-singing, whatever other changes their poverty or prejudices or principles or persecutions might have produced.

It remains for us to speak of the ancient hymns which have come down to our day. We have some information as to Harmonius and Bardesanes, who wrote Syriac hymns in the first century, but the hymns themselves are either lost or unidentified. Ephrem Syrus (died 378) furnishes the earliest authentic hymns in that language. One of these (Daniel, Thesaurus Hymnologicus, III. 145) is on the Nativity of our Lord, and may be thus rendered, following Zingerle’s German version:

“Into his arms with tender love

Did Joseph take his holy son,

And worshipped him as God, and saw

The babe like any little one.

His heart rejoiced above him there,

For now the only Good had birth;

And pious fear upon him came

Before this Judge of all the earth.

Oh, what a lofty wonder!

“Who gave me then this precious Son

Of highest God, to be my child?

For I against thy mother here

Had almost been by zeal beguiled;

And I had thought to cast her off—

Alas, I saw not truly then

How in her bosom she should bear

The costliest treasure known to men,

To make my poverty, so soon,

The richest lot in mortal ken!

“David, that king of ancient days,

My ancestor, had placed the crown

On his own head, and there it lay;

But I sank deep and further down:

I was no king, but in its stead

A carpenter, and that alone.

But now may crown my brow again

That which befits a kingly throne,

For here upon my bosom lies

The Lord of lords, my very own!”

There is a trifle of doubt as to which is the very oldest Greek hymn. One cited by Basil (died 379),

“Φῶς ἱλαρὸν ἁγίας δοξής”—κ. τ. λ.

has been by some considered the most ancient, and is known to us as, “Hail, gladdening Light.” It is wrongly credited to Athenagenes (died 169), for Basil explicitly denies that authorship. That which it is safest for us to receive is one found in the works of Clement of Alexandria, and by him ascribed to an earlier author. It was probably composed about 200 A.D.; and while it is too long to quote, it may be characterized as dithyrambic, and almost Anacreontic, in rhythm. It begins:

“Στρομίον πώλων ἀδαῶν.”—κ. τ. λ.

and is known as “Shepherd of Tender Youth,” from its best English version, by the Rev. Dr. H. M. Dexter, of Boston. The Φῶς ἱλαρὸν is also accessible in Longfellow’s beautiful translation in the Golden Legend, commencing, “O gladsome light.”

As we turn the pages on which Daniel and Mone have recorded these hymns of the earliest age of the Church, we observe that they are either in praise of Christ or of God, or are songs of worship for the morning or the evening. Their simplicity is admirable. Here is one called ἦχος—an “Echo”—literally rendered:

“We who have risen from our sleep

Worship before thee, O Good One.

And, of the angels the hymn

We cry aloud to thee, thou Mighty One;

Holy, holy art thou, O God,

And of thy mercy have pity on us!

“From my couch and from my sleep

Thou hast raised me, O Lord;

Enlighten my mind and my heart,

And open thou my lips

To praise thee, Holy Trinity,

Holy, holy, holy art thou!

“Suddenly shall come the Judge,

And the deeds of each shall be laid bare;

But guard us from fear in the midst of the night,

Holy, holy, holy art thou!”

Another of these unplaced, anonymous, and possibly very ancient hymns, may be given in full for comparison:

“Ψυχή μου, ψυχή μου,

Ἀνάστα, τί καθεύδεις;

Τὸ τέλος ἐγγίζει,

Καὶ μήλλεις θορυβεῖσθαι;

“Ἀνάνηψον ὀυν, ἵνα

Φείσηται σου Χριστὸς

Ὁ Θεὸς, ὁ πανταχοῦ παρὼν

Καὶ τὰ πάντα πληρῶν.”

“O soul of mine, O soul of mine,

Arise, why sleepest thou?

The end of earth is drawing near

And art thou fearful now?

Be sober therefore, O my soul,

That He who filleth space

And filleth time, our Saviour, God,

May spare thee by His grace.”

And this beautiful little doxology:

“My hope is God,

My refuge is the Lord,

My shelter is the Holy Ghost;

Be thou, O Holy Three, adored!”

In such sweet and simple language did the early Christians sing their “praise to Christ, as God.” They understood the true meaning of a hymn as Ambrose and St. Bernard also understood it—and as Gregory Nazianzen and Adam of St. Victor never knew it at all. In 1866 Professor Coppée could truly declare that there was no collection of sacred verse in which this thought of adoration and of worship was “the leading feature.” It is better now; but even to-day there is an honored place for any book of praise in which the formal and didactic shall be done away, and where nothing shall be found but the pure reverence of a loving and trusting soul.

Of old, in the temple, there was kept—said the rabbins—a flute of reed, plain and straight and simple, but of marvellous sweetness. It came down from Moses’ day. But the king commanded his goldsmiths to cover and adorn it with gold and gems. And, lo, the sweetness of the reed flute was forever gone! Thus, perchance, in our later art and our foolish wisdom, it may be we have often spoiled the ancient hymns!

CHAPTER II.
THE STUDY OF THE LATIN HYMNS.

The genealogy of the song of praise in the mediaeval and modern Christian Church is both simple and beautiful. It begins far back, as we have seen, in the chants and psalms of the Hebrew. Then it changes to the Syriac and the Greek. Then it emerges into the Latin. Next it is caught up in the old High-German poetry, and at length it becomes the modern English hymn. The line of direct descent is like that of some high and puissant family whose inheritance is transferred now to one branch and now to another, but whose noble lineage is never lost.

When the reader or the worshipper is attracted to-day by some ancient hymn-writer’s name, he naturally asks for information. He is aware that hymnology is called a branch of study, like any other scholastic pursuit. He is also aware that the more usual English and German hymns have their historians, and, to a limited degree, that they have been analyzed, classified, compared, and their text settled. Even their impelling causes and surroundings are known, as in the case of the touching lyrics of George Neumark and Paul Gerhardt, or the pathetic strains of Cowper, or the stirring notes of Charles Wesley.

But occasionally a bird of strange plumage flies across this peaceful sky or perches and sings in these religious groves. The name of some Greek father—an Anatolius or a John of Damascus—appears as the original author. The hymn-horizon widens out to an earlier age. When one sings the Te Deum Laudamus, he discovers that it has its antecedent in the Greek liturgy. And when he employs that fine version of Bishop Patrick,

“O God, we praise Thee and confess,”

he is put upon a track of inquiry by which he discerns an even earlier rendering in the oldest prayer-books, beginning—

“We praise Thee, God, we knowledge Thee

The only Lord to be.”

These little hints and stray gleams of outlook through the mists of uninformation are intensely alluring. And when by some happy chance it is learned that this old Latin sequence is traditionally ascribed to Ambrose, Bishop of Milan; when it is accredited to the spontaneous utterance of Augustine and his great preceptor at the time of Augustine’s baptism; when it is noted as a derivative from that Greek psalmody whence the holy Ambrose obtained so many of his hymns; and when it opens thus a door into the heaven of the earlier worship of the Church, then indeed the reader is proportionately stimulated to further question.

For the most part it will be found that the Latin language contains the best of the Greek, and the inspiration of the majority of the first German hymns. In the dead ark of the Middle Ages was kept this rod that budded and this golden pot with its sacred heavenly food. It is amazing that this treasure has been so well preserved, but it is none the less certain that we now have it safely, never to be lost again.

There are no Latin hymns—let us here say—earlier than Hilary of Poitiers (died 366). His Hymnarium has perished, and all but one of the compositions attributed to himself are doubtful. The “evening-song” which he sent to his daughter Abra, while he was in exile among the followers of the Eastern Church, forms the connecting link between Greek and Latin hymnody. The true hymn—a different thing from the rhythmic but unmetrical sequence—here takes its rise. In this small, pure fountain-head reappear the percolating praises of the two previous centuries. The short lines drop with a gentle tinkling melody upon the ear. As yet there is no rhyme, although there is an occasional lightening of the lyric by some such verbal art.

But with Ambrose the full stream begins to sweep along. There can be no doubt that many ungathered and traditional stanzas were in his time discoverable in the Church—much as it can be observed that phrases in prayer or in exhortation are the inheritance of our own generation from days of struggle and of trial among our Christian ancestors. And what better could a beleaguered bishop do, when he was shut up in a church “for the word of God and the testimony of Jesus Christ,” than to collate these old hymns? Twelve possibly—eight, or less, with moderate certainty—can be regarded as of his own composition. The rest of the ninety or a hundred are commonly received as “Ambrosian,” since they share his spirit and partake in some degree of his method. The rules of the Venerable Bede are not infallible, and modern criticism frequently rejects what the early collectors are disposed to assign to this single illustrious source.

Augustine wrote no actual hymns, but he was the cause of hymns in others—as, notably, in the case of Cardinal Peter Damiani. The Ambrosian music and the Augustinian theology served for inspiration to many later men. Yet the assignment of these Latin hymns to their proper authors is, at the best, a most precarious undertaking. A few, quoted or mentioned by competent witnesses—as when Augustine quotes Ambrose—seem duly authentic. This is, however, a rare occurrence. Generally we proceed upon the mere dictum of the first compilers—especially of Thomasius, George Fabricius, and Clichtove.

These early compilations are sufficiently scarce. Professor Dr. H. Ad. Daniel gives a list of some which, except for the books of “the venerable Thilo” in the Yale Library, are beyond the reach of American students. Dating from 1492 and running into the first decade of the sixteenth century there were many “Expositions” of hymns, of which the work of Clichtove (Basle, 1517) remains to us in the greatest number of editions. Up to the middle of the present century this book was practically indispensable to any correct knowledge of the original texts. Since that time it, as well as every similar work, has received attention, and its contents have been often reproduced.

Other and later laborers are such as Cardinal Thomasius (Rome, 1741), who follows upon the traces of George Cassander, the Liberal Catholic (Paris, 1616). We are possibly more indebted to Cassander than to Thomasius for the correct designation of a good deal of the authorship. Both of these editors collate the text with other versions, and thus prepare the way for later and more accurate work. Both depend to a notable degree upon the book of George Fabricius (Basle, 1564), which is quite rare; although Thomasius’ works are said by Daniel to be sufficiently uncommon in Germany, as they certainly are in America. The recent republication of the Mozarabic Breviary in J. P. Migne’s Patrologia brings this volume, however, within easy reach.

Thus we are naturally led to speak of the sources of the hymns themselves—sources from which these editors have secured them. As a part of religious worship they were incorporated into the various breviaries, of which hundreds must have been in use before the unification begun by the Church of Rome in the sixteenth century. Besides these church books, there were collections of hymns alone made by mediaeval schools, whose manuscripts still exist in European libraries.

The only method by which to ascertain the number and extent of these treasures was to gather and classify them. And strangely enough this labor has been performed by Protestants rather than by Catholics. Cassander’s book was forbidden at Rome, as he was what now would be called an Old Catholic; Luther, George Fabricius, and Hermann Bonn were in no better odor of sanctity; and for our own times the standard work is that of Herman Adelbert Daniel, who was a Lutheran professor at Halle, while close behind him come several others of the same religious belief.

The necessary and highly difficult task of getting the materials together has been exhaustively performed. Professor Daniel’s investigations extended to the original copies in monasteries and abbeys almost without number. But F. J. Mone enlarged even upon this. Daniel’s Thesaurus in five volumes was completed in 1856—having been several years in course of publication—and it stands as yet unrivalled. Mone’s Lateinische Hymnen des Mittelalters appeared in 1853-55, and was therefore available for the conclusion of Daniel’s great work. Its value consists in the fact that it is derived exclusively from manuscripts and from material hitherto untouched. The Germans, indeed, have made Latin hymnology a special branch of study, considering that it is profitable to them for its value religiously and historically. From old Flacius Illyricus’ appendix to the Catalogus Testium Veritatis has been recovered the original of Bernard of Cluny’s “Jerusalem the Golden”—a poem which would never have been known by us if this same Matthias Flacius had not preserved it as a testimony against the corrupt state of the Church.

We must then add the German names of Schlosser, and Simrock, and Fortlage, and Stadelmann, and Jacob Grimm, and Königsfeld, and Bässler, and Kayser, and Kehrein, and Morel. Wackernagel and Koch, the great historians of German hymnology, have also done admirable service in prefixing the Latin hymns to the earlier part of their collections and histories of German praise. There is a host of lesser names, and there have been some separate discoveries worthy of note. Thus the English ritualists, under the lead of Newman and Neale, unearthed some capital lyrics. The Hymni Ecclesiae of Cardinal J. H. Newman, being half derived from the Paris Breviary, contain hymns which are scarcely to be found elsewhere—many of them, as our Index will show, being accessible only in those pages. The Sequentiae Medii Aevii of Dr. John Mason Neale also bring to us texts which are extremely scarce. Archbishop Trench, in his collection of eighty hymns, has avoided anything like Romanism even to the occasional expurgation of a phrase; but he has given us a few hymns which are difficult to procure. Königsfeld’s selection of one hundred is admirable; and Bässler’s and Simrock’s little books have made a very good choice. More recently still Professor F. A. March, of Lafayette College, has prepared a selection of one hundred and fifty of these hymns for the use of institutions of learning; and this, for every purpose, is the finest and most satisfactory series of texts at our command. The ordinary student can learn much from this before he needs to attempt the larger and more expensive works.

In making an exhaustive index of all the originals before us, these collections soon dwindle into a very diminutive form. There are about three thousand five hundred hymns in the various books. And they are of all sorts—good, bad, and indifferent. The good are the pure and true utterance of pious spirits—such lyrics as the Veni, Redemptor, and the Veni, Sancte Spiritus, and the Vexilla Regis. The positively bad are those which are either poor in execution—a common fault—or decidedly defective in religious tone. Many so-called “hymns” are nothing but plagiaries or parodies upon older compositions. Some are debased into mere patchwork. There are a few which are macaronic, and a great many in which poverty of phrase is helped out by wholesale pilfering. Moreover, it is easy to find those which are highly objectionable in point of taste and theology, to say nothing of prosody or Protestantism. And if Protestants are principally energetic in restoring and editing these hymns, to the frank and generous extent of overlooking what is unpleasant in them, it ought to follow that they should not be blamed for preferring only those lyrics in which the broad and Christian fervor of devout souls can be observed.

Of those hymns which are upon the border line, the pathetic Stabat Mater may stand as an example. It would be bigotry to reject it from the list—as one compiler has done—while it would certainly not be fair to Protestants to utilize it, in any close translation, for the worship of the Church universal.

Perhaps there are not less than from four to five hundred of these hymns, then, to which no cause of blame can attach—which are as dear to the Church of the Roman Catholics as to that of the Catholic Protestants. On such common ground the heartiest sympathy and co-operation can develop the riches which yet remain. Already it is Caswall, the priest, and Newman, the cardinal, and Neale, the ritualist, who have given to our daily praise the happiest versions. It is Ozanam who has discovered several unknown hymns; and Gautier and Digby S. Wrangham who have brought out Adam of St. Victor; and the ninety-seven pieces of Abaelard are reprinted from Cousin’s text in Migne’s Patrologia. The study of these sacred verses has been comparatively limited in range and nationality, but it has had the incomparable advantage of being thorough.

Thus we are to-day possessed of the text of every really fine sacred Latin lyric. Somewhere or other it has bloomed and has been gathered by some acute hymnologist. The text, too, is tolerably clarified. Translations into our own tongue have been made by such men as Caswall and Newman and Neale (who have rendered all the hymns of the Roman Breviary), and by Mant, Chandler, Pearson, Kynaston, and many others. In America the Rev. Dr. Washburn, Dr. Coles, and Chancellor Benedict have been as prolific as any. Scattered renderings have obtained place in various hymnals. And we are now prepared at last for the general and popular interest which should be taken in this vast treasure of the Latin tongue.

Nothing is more surprising than the utter misinformation which prevails. A few scholars, like Dr. Schaff and Dr. William R. Williams, have endeavored to illuminate our American darkness. But, speaking only now of the Latin hymns, the story of their authors remains obscure and the romantic history of their origin remains for the most part untouched.

Yet Prudentius, the Spaniard, was a classic survival in Spain. And Damasus, the pope, was associated with certain dramatic scenes. And Venantius Fortunatus, troubadour and bishop, furnishes us with a most striking portrait of the times in his attachment to the abbess-queen, Radegunda. The list presumably includes Elpis, the wife of Boethius, the “last of the Romans;” and Coelius Sedulius, the Briton; and Gregory the Great and the great archbishop, Rabanus Maurus, and perhaps Robert II. of France. It calls into fresh life the histories of the Venerable Bede and of Alcuin; of the two Bernards, the one of Clairvaux and the other of Cluny; of Peter the Venerable and of Abaelard and Heloise; of Adam of St. Victor, and Thomas of Celano; of Bonaventura and Aquinas and à Kempis and Xavier. It shows us that mad Solomon, poor Jacoponus; and it leaves us with verses from John Huss, the martyr, to be read by the light of the Reformation’s dawn.

Thus largely does the subject of the Latin hymns traverse the ages. From the fourth to the sixteenth centuries of the Christian era it is the one stream which was fed from Alpine or from Pyrenean snows—a “river of God that is full of water,” which expands into the stately movement of the Notkerian and Gottschalkian sequence, or gently murmurs its song of trust with the missionary Xavier as he writes the exquisite melody of that hymn, O Deus, ego amo te! To understand and to love these lyrics is to be better fitted for this nineteenth century of praise. Not the persecutors and the injurious, not the cruel and the cold-hearted will then remain to us; but the Dies Irae will utter its trumpet-voice above the dead phrases of a formal service, and the Salve caput cruentatum will call us afresh to the foot of the cross.

CHAPTER III.
HILARY OF POITIERS AND THE EARLIEST LATIN HYMNS.

When Master Peter Abaelard was preparing his own hymns for use in the Abbey of the Paraclete, he prefaced them with a brief treatise. There were ninety-three of them, arranged for all the services of Heloise and her nuns, and he answers the request of his abbess-wife by sending them, somewhere in the neighborhood of the year 1135. “At the instance of thy requests, my sister Heloise,” he writes, “formerly dear in the world and now most dear in Christ, I have composed what are called in Greek, ‘hymns,’ and in Hebrew, ‘tillim.’” For it is plain that she has a vivid recollection of his “wild, unhallowed rhymes, writ in his unbaptized times,” and she would now have him tune his lyre, as Robert Herrick did, to a loftier strain.

Hence he made for these gentle sisters a hymn-book of their own, and so became the Watts or Wesley of their matins and vespers. With characteristic self-confidence he only included what he had himself prepared; but this introduction casts a great deal of light upon the knowledge and piety of the time respecting hymns.

“I remember,” continues Abaelard, “that you asked me for an explanation. ‘We know,’ you said, ‘that the Latin, and especially the French Church, have in psalms, and also in hymns, followed more a custom than an authority.’” This was quite true; and the remark is eminently characteristic of Heloise, whose scholarship was admirable, and whose disposition was of a sort to crave for and cling to a stronger nature. He then quotes for her the decree of the fourth Council of Toledo (A.D. 633), by which Hilary of Poitiers and Ambrose of Milan are established as the great fathers of Christian song in the Western Church, and by which the praise of God in hymns is sanctioned and commended.

To much the same effect are the words of Augustine of Hippo, centuries earlier. His beloved mother, Monica, had died, and nothing appeared to comfort him so much as one of these same holy songs. “Then I slept, and woke up again and found my grief not a little softened; and as I was alone in my bed, I remembered those true verses of thy Ambrose. For thou art the

“‘Maker of all, the Lord

And Ruler of the height,

Who, robing day in light, hast poured

Soft slumbers o’er the night,

That to our limbs the power

Of toil may be renewed,

And hearts be raised that sink and cower,

And sorrows be subdued.’”

This is the Deus creator omnium of the great bishop of Milan; and this, in consequence of Augustine’s quotation, is among the best authenticated and earliest hymns of the Latin Church.

But there were more ancient hymns than the Ambrosian or Augustinian. They bear the name of Hilary, and with them Latin hymnology really begins. It is true that in the previous century—the third—Cyprian of Carthage had written religious poetry, but he composed nothing which could be sung. There is, indeed, nothing previous to Hilary.

And now let us go back to the creation of this first and noblest light. For Hilary had been a heathen—a heathen of the heathen—in Roman Gaul. He was born in Poitiers (Pictavium) about the beginning of the fourth century. His father’s name was Francarius, whose tomb—although he must at first have lived as an idolater—is said by Bouchet to have been “for upward of fifteen hundred years” in the parish church of Clissonium (Clisson, near Nantes). We are indebted to Jerome for the main facts of Hilary’s life, and to Fortunatus for a large share in the filling up of the outlines. Hilary was so celebrated a man that contemporary references are more abundant and helpful in his career even than in that of Shakespeare. In those days he was at the summit of renown, a notable exception to the case of the prophet, “not being without honor save in his own country.” “For who,” says Augustine, “does not know Hilary the Gallic bishop?” And Jerome wrote to St. Eustacia that Hilary and Cyprian were the “two great cedars of the age.”

He was doubtless well educated. His Latin was good and copious, without possessing very great polish. His Greek was sufficient to fit him to translate the creeds of the Eastern Church, and to become familiar with their hymns. We have his own testimony that he lived in comfort, if not in luxury; and the inference is plain that his family were of consequence in the place. It was in his leisure that he took up Moses and the prophets; and there, in that famous old town of his birth, the mists of his idolatry thinned away. We do not know that any external pressure was brought to bear upon his mind, or that he was led by anything except a natural curiosity into this new learning.

Poitiers itself is a noble situation for such an intellect. It is perched on a promontory, and surrounded on all sides by gorges and narrow valleys. The isthmus, which joins it back to the ridge, was once walled and ditched across. The Pictavi, and afterward the Romans, understood the military advantages of the spot. It has always been the abode of scholars and of warriors. Here Francis Bacon once studied. Here Clovis, founder of the Merovingian dynasty, beat Alaric II., in 507, in fair battle. Here Radegunda the Holy lies buried. Here Fortunatus, the poet-bishop, dwelled. Here Charles Martel hammered the Saracens in 732. Here, in the Cathedral of St. Pierre, rest the ashes of Richard Coeur de Lion. Here, beneath these walls, fought Edward the Black Prince against King John of France, in 1356, when the English had the best of the day. For they had learned—as Bishop Hugh Latimer says that he himself was taught—how to draw the cloth-yard shaft to a head, and let it fly with a deadly aim. “In my tyme,” said Latimer, “my poore father was as diligent to teach me to shote as to learne anye other thynge, and so I thynke other menne dyd theyr children. Hee taughte me how to drawe, how to laye my bodye in my bowe, and not to drawe with strength of armes as other nacions do, but with strength of the bodye. I had my bowes boughte me accordyng to my age and strength; as I encreased in them, so my bowes were made bigger and bigger; for men shall never shoot well excepte they be broughte up in it.” (Sixth sermon before Edward VI.) It was such archery as this that laid the flower of France in the dust, and put John, their king, into prison.

Poitiers is thus a noble and appropriate birthplace for one who before the time of Charles the Hammerer was called the “Hammer of the Arians” (Malleus Arianorum), and who combined fighting with praying all through his life. Places and circumstances and the untamable blood of heroes have more to do with the making of men than we suppose; and Hilary was so distinctly a son of Caesar’s Gaul that he became its large, true, and free expression, appropriate to its landscape and harmonized to its atmosphere.

And as to his emergence from heathenism, there can be nothing more satisfactory to us than his own story. He has recorded that when he found, in Exodus, how God was called “I am that I am,” and when he read in Isaiah (40:12) of a deity who “held the wind in His fists,” and again (66:1) of Him who said, “Heaven is My throne and earth is My footstool,” then this Deus immensus surpassed all his heathen conceptions of grandeur and power. And when he read (in Ps. 138:7) how this great God loved and cared for His children, so that one could say, “Though I walk in the midst of trouble, Thou wilt revive me; Thou shalt stretch forth Thine hand against the wrath of mine enemies, and Thy right hand shall save me”—then he was drawn toward this mighty being by a sentiment of confidence and trust. He also—turning the pages of the Wisdom of Solomon (13:5) in the Apocrypha—found it written that “by the greatness and beauty of the creatures proportionately the Maker of them is seen.” And then, encountering the Gospel of John, its opening sentences clarified his mind. All became plain. He accepted with calmness, firmness, and dignity the great doctrines of the Christian faith. He was imbued with John’s conception of that Word, “which was in the beginning” and “which was God.” From that moment he had a theology which was as pure as crystal and as indestructible as adamant. There is no muddiness about his ideas from this time onward, though Arians buzz and sting, and calamities rain upon him, and the path of duty is deep with mire and the future is dark. Every one of these things passes away. His own language as to this great change in his belief is as characteristic as it is beautiful: “I extended my desires further, and longed that the good thoughts I had about God, and the good life which I built on them, might have an eternal reward.” Like one of his own favorite saints in the Gospel and the Apocalypse of John, he was thus “led by the Spirit of God” to become one of the chanting choir before the throne.

It matters very little, therefore, to us of to-day, that, in 1851, Pius IX., himself a man of sweet and gentle temper, made Hilary a “Doctor of the Church”—a distinction reserved for those greatest ones, like Augustine and Chrysostom, whose learning and eloquence are world-renowned. The dead bishop did not need this posthumous distinction. He has long been recognized—to quote Professor Dorner—as “one of the most original and profound,” albeit not the easiest to understand at all times, of the great teachers of the Christian Church. We may hereafter attach more value to his work even than we do at present.

This then was the man who had determined to enter upon a Christian life. He was already married and had one daughter—Abra by name—and possessed a certain repute as a man of reading and of affairs. His origin protected him from a contempt of pagan learning; and his marriage protected him from that one-sided development which has Romanized the once Catholic Church. The period in which he lived was one of transition—from classic literature to Christian literature, and from the Latin of far-off Virgil and Cicero to the Latin which was to become the uniting tongue of all scholars in that Babel of the Middle Ages. This language was now shaping itself to its new work and becoming, like English under the genius of Chaucer, a living speech. In the moulding hands of these first Christian writers it became flexible, not always fluent or graceful or even strictly grammatical, but capable at least to carry what would otherwise have been lost. Greek was gone, and French and German and English had not yet appeared. As a Gallo-Roman, then—a post-classic Latinist—Hilary gives in his allegiance to Christianity, and his wife and daughter are baptized with him into the true faith.

So far much is conjectural; and more is vague and to be derived from the shadows cast upon the screen of history by the “spirit of the years to come yearning to mix itself with life.” We emerge, however, into historical certainty about the year 351. Then, on the death of their bishop—who is thought to have been Maxentius, the brother of St. Maximin of Trier—his townspeople clamored for Hilary. The Histoire Litteraire de la France sets this election down for the year 350; but that authority, in this and a great many other instances, is profuse and multitudinous and not absolutely safe. We are certainly not far out from the correct date in saying 351.

It illustrates a condition of things which are suggestive of the simplicity of the early Church, when we find that in spite of his being a married man and a father—and in spite of Cyprian’s and of Tertullian’s praises of celibacy—Hilary was heartily chosen and almost forced into the episcopate. In this position he exhibited “all the excellent qualities of the great bishops.” We are told that he was “gentle and peaceable, given particularly to an ability to persuade and to influence.” With these he joined “a holy vigor which held him firm against rising heresies.” And Cassian says that Hilary “had all the virtues of an incomparable man.” The fact, after all, speaks for itself more loudly than these commendations. He was so much one of themselves that the people of Poitiers would not have selected him, if they had not known him to be the best man for the mitre.

From this time began that career of stainless honor which has outlasted the very walls which echoed his voice. He was known from Great Britain to the Indies. He ranks second only to Athanasius as a defender of the faith; and—as we already noted—he is classed by Jerome with the great bishop of Hippo whose portrait is given to us so vividly in Charles Kingsley’s Hypatia. And to us of our century and of our convictions in favor of charity and culture, it is particularly praiseworthy that he never gave up his secular scholarship, and that he never flagged or faltered in defending opinions which were as large and liberal as they were undeniably orthodox. He was an oak which stood against the blast unshaken, and which yet held, in the heart of its great branches, sweet nests of singing birds and leafy coverts of shade and peace.

Hilary was not suffered to be inactive. It was the period at which the Arian heresy was in full incandescence. No one holding the opinions of the Bishop of Poitiers could well remain neutral. He had—in conformity with a custom soon to become a law—separated his life from that of his home; but he appears always to have cherished a warm love for his wife and child. This placed him, however, in perfect freedom from other cares, and at liberty to devote himself to the eradication of false doctrine. Constantius, the Emperor, was an Arian, and this made the perplexity of the position very great. An honest man might ruin all by his blunt independence—but an honest man dare not be silent. And, besides, Hilary had neither attended the Synod of Arles (353) nor that of Milan (355), and was somewhat out of the ecclesiastical tide.

That he was no coward was soon shown to everybody’s satisfaction. He prepared a letter to the Emperor as brave as it was keen, and which touched up with a vigorous lash the cringing sycophants and shuffling hypocrites about the court. Hilary is notably strong when he denounces the substitution of force for reason—and perhaps his doctorate came to him only in 1851 (when he could not well care much for it) because this doctrine of his was not altogether what Mother Church has been in the habit of teaching and practising! I may refer to the recent work of the Rev. R. T. Smith upon The Church in Roman Gaul as fully confirming this statement. St. Martin of Tours is there called to bear testimony that the Bishop of Poitiers held such opinions just as sturdily in his days of power as in these times of trial and persecution. He was, in short, a thoroughly sincere man, and it took him only a few years—until 355—to get into the hottest bubbling spot of all the caldron. At that date, in company with other leaders of the church in Gaul, he drove out a very pestilent fellow—Saturninus, the Bishop of Arles—as a seditious and irreconcilable element in their midst. With him was cast out Valens, and with Valens was cast out Ursacius. But of all these, Bishop Saturninus was the angriest and the most revengeful.

A year of something like good order followed, when lo, the Arians came to the front with a synod of their own complexion at Beziers. Here Hilary found himself in the vocative case altogether. The tables were turned upon him, and it was he who must now go forth a banished man. The power was against him, and he set out with bowed head and sad heart upon one of those pride-humbling journeys which have not seldom brought the greatest results to religion, and which not a few of the best men have taken in their day. In this manner Bernard went to meet Abaelard; Martin Luther went to the diet at Worms; and John Bunyan took his way to Bedford jail.

Principal among the causes of his sadness was that he was snatched away from his constant and congenial duty of explaining the Scriptures to the people of his diocese. Still he had nothing for it but to go; and so, somewhere about 356, we find him in Phrygia. He is accompanied by Rodanius, Bishop of Toulouse, who had plucked up considerable courage by seeing how well Hilary took his defeat.

In 357 the Church in Roman Gaul sent him their greeting, from which that of his own Poitiers people was not absent. And the Gallic bishops, having perceived him to be capable of much good service in his enforced residence abroad, bade him inform himself and them upon the creeds and customs of the Eastern Church. This he had already, to a degree, undertaken. And in 359, whom do we find entering a convocation of bishops at Seleucia but our very Hilary, opposing with a strong and unflinching philosophic power all those—and there were many there—who denied the consubstantiality of the Word.

There were one hundred and sixty of these bishops at Seleucia, of whom one hundred and five—a very handsome majority—were “semi-Arians.” Of the remaining fifty-five there were nineteen classed as Anomoeans—those who held that the Son was unlike the Father in essence, or ἀνόμοιος—and the rest were heretics of different grades of badness. It was the natural outcome of the difficulties with Athanasius, where the royal authority was on the side of the Arians. The Roman Catholic historians are therefore not complimentary to this synod—or rather “double council” of Seleucia and Rimini—and this was assuredly no very comfortable body of Christians for a banished bishop to exhort. But he did it with effect, and proceeded to the council at Constantinople (360) and did it again; and presently (361) Constantius died and the Nicene Creed was victorious.

So was Hilary, who—in 360-61—returned to Poitiers, where, as soon as his crozier was once more well in hand, he levelled Saturninus and compelled him to abandon his diocese. He then turned upon Auxentius of Milan, who only escaped the same or a worse fate by clinging to Valentinian, the reigning Emperor, and was denounced by Hilary as a hypocrite for his pains. Our bishop appears in these days to have been decidedly a member of the Church Militant; and perhaps it was natural enough when one had survived the reigns of Constantius, Julian the Apostate, and Jovian, for him to be as he was. I am not commenting upon these exciting scenes; I desire rather to go back and show how they produced the hymns of which we are to speak.

It was in 357—at the same date with the letters from the bishops and from the churches—that Abra, his daughter, wrote to him herself. From this epistle we learn that her mother still lived, and we observe the dutiful and loving daughter apparent in every line. In reply Hilary sends a well-composed and even imaginative letter. Under the figures of a pearl and a garment he charges her to keep her soul and her conduct pure. He rather recommends a single life, but not in any such extravagant eulogy of celibacy as some would have us suppose. It is more after the style of what Grynaeus affirmed of him—that he was so moderate in these opinions as to suffer his canons to marry—since it would be hard for an unbiassed mind to draw any harsh conclusions from the language; yet all this is of small consequence compared with the enclosure—two Latin hymns, one for the morning and one for the evening, which she may use in the worship of God. The first of these is the Lucis largitor splendide; but the second is probably lost. It is said that it was the hymn, Ad coeli clara non sum dignus sidera—“To the clear stars of heaven I am not worthy,” etc. This is very doubtful indeed, so much so that we may decline to receive it on several grounds. It is to be found in the superb folio edition of Hilary’s works (Paris, 1693) prepared by the Benedictines of St. Maur. Yet if internal evidence is to weigh at all we must reject it without scruple. It is not a hymn in any true sense, and certainly has no reference to the evening hour of worship. It contains a gross phrase or two, which are not suggestive of Hilary, who would scarcely have said that he would “despise Arius” by “modulating a hymn” against him, nor would he have spoken of the “barking Sabellius” or the “grunting Simon.” The verses are unpleasantly flavored with earthliness, and to think that a young girl would be inclined to sing ninety-six lines of an abecedary—or “alphabet-hymn”—is absurd. Moreover, the editors of the edition of 1693 only print four stanzas, and express their own disbelief that Hilary wrote it, based upon these facts and upon their no less important criticism of the style, which is masculine throughout, and refers to ideas highly inappropriate to the use intended. Mone is nearer to the correct doctrine when he assigns it to a period between the sixth and eighth centuries. Daniel (4:130) prints it in full and quotes Mone’s remark that an Irish monk is likely to have been its author. It is in the metre familiar to modern eyes in the Integer vitae of Horace, but it displays neither taste nor poetry nor any religious fervor. That it begins each stanza with a consecutive letter of the alphabet is no proof of anything except wasted ingenuity. So that, I repeat, we do well to reject it and to leave it rejected.

All, then, that is left us is the Lucis largitor splendide—“Thou splendid giver of the light.” The letter went back from Seleucia to Poitiers and carried this hymn, at least, with it. Hilary had sent this and its companion, ut memor mei semper sis—“that you may always remember me.” And we may fancy the lovely high-born daughter of that earnest and scholarly man as, daily and nightly, she sits at her window—perchance with her gaze wistfully turned to the eastward. There she sang these simple, beautiful hymns—she the first singer of the new hymns of the Latin Church. Among the themes for Christian art yet left to us there is hardly one more suggestive than this—for Abra doubtless sang her father’s hymns to her father’s loyal people. It may even be supposed that he gave her the tunes as well as the words, and that, by morning and by night, the battle-scarred Poitiers re-echoed this voice of the exiled bishop.

Of the hymn itself as much can be said in favor as we have just said against its pretended and ill-matched companion. It breathes the Johannean sentiments throughout. It celebrates the Light, the Son of God, the glory of the Father, “clearer than the full sun, the perfect light and day itself.” To one who is acquainted with the Greek hymns it is instantly suggestive of those pellucid songs—its atmosphere is all peace and its trust is as restful to the tired spirit as the quiet coming of the rising day. It may easily have been a translation from the Greek, or, even more easily, the natural up-gush of melody which was touched into life by the frequent hearing of the Eastern hymns. Hilary never learned it in an Arian church, nor did he find it among controversialists. Its nest, where it was first reared, was in some corner of a catacomb or in some nook of the Holy Land. This hymn, then, we may safely accept as the oldest authentic original Latin “song of praise to Christ as God.”

Whether the Bishop of Poitiers had much or little learning, he wrote a valuable book on Synods, and translated for us many useful and otherwise inaccessible confessions of faith and statements of doctrine. Erasmus—himself no brave man, nor one likely to estimate moral courage properly—calls this letter to Abra “nugamentum hominis otiose indocti”—the trifling production of a man lazily uneducated! Well, perhaps it would have been as well if some of that same “luxurious ignorance” of Hilary could have secured the “laborious learning” of Erasmus from exhibiting, at the end of life, its own inefficiency. Jerome said that whoever found fault with Hilary’s knowledge was compelled to concede his philosophic skill; and it reminds one of the remark of Dante Rossetti, who said that nothing in our age could stand comparison with a sonnet of Shakespeare, for, rough as it might seem, Shakespeare wrote it. It was this manhood behind the Latin which went for more than all Rotterdam!

Hilary is credited with a great deal, doubtless, that he never wrote. So he is, by Fortunatus, with miracles which he never performed. Alcuin and others assign to him the Gloria in Excelsis, but this was certainly more ancient than Hilary, being quoted by Athanasius in his treatise on Virginity. He could at best merely have translated it. This he might also have done for the Te Deum laudamus. And since we know that he prepared a Liber Hymnorum—the first actual hymn-book of the Western Church—we have some reason to think that he would not have altogether forgotten the greatest chants of the early Christians. This hymn-book is utterly lost to us. This is not the same as the Liber Mysteriorum—the book of the mysteries—and its existence, like that of its companion work, rests upon the testimony of Jerome. Doubtless in it there were other poems and songs from which the Hilarian authorship has been broken or lost. It was not the ancient custom either to preserve the author’s name, or even to retain the precise form of his hymn. He threw his little lyric—as the Israelites did their jewelry—into the common treasury of the Church; and in the Breviaries, where so many of these hymns are to be discovered, a later and more critical scholarship may identify some of them hereafter. As delicate insects are preserved in amber, we there find much that we should otherwise have lost; but, like that very amber, when its electricity is excited, his was that sort of reputation which attracted many anonymous trifles—as, for example, the Ad coeli clara—to itself.

Of Hilary’s other writings, with exception of his work on the Councils of Ariminum and Seleucia, we have the full text. His commentaries on the Psalms and on Matthew; his controversial pamphlets against Constantius; his book of Synods; his twelve books De Trinitate—these are accessible in the Patrologia of Migne.

It was undoubtedly believed at the time of the fourth Council of Toledo that he had written many pieces “in favor of God, and of the triumphs of apostles and martyrs;” and both Jerome and Isidore of Seville declare him to have been the first among the Latins to write Christian verse. But to show how uncertain is the conjecture that is thus started, I may mention that the Ut queant laxis of Paul Winfrid, the “Deacon,” is credited to Hilary by the Histoire Litteraire. The same authority also claims for him the first Pange lingua (Pange lingua gloriosi, praelium certaminis), which is sometimes assigned to Claudianus Mamertus, but is the well-authenticated composition of Venantius Fortunatus, the troubadour and friend of Radegunda, the wife of Clotaire. We may as well admit that a great man did not necessarily do all the great things of his day.

Besides, the search after truth in this matter is complicated marvellously by the trade of the hymn-tinkers, who put new bottoms and tops and sides to a great many religious lyrics. Here is a case in point in Mone (vol. iii., p. 633). The hymn begins Christum rogemus et patrem—“We call on Christ and on the Father.” It has seven stanzas. The first stanza is from a morning hymn, supposed to be by Hilary. The second is from an Ambrosian hymn. The third and fourth are from another Ambrosian hymn to the Archangel Michael. The fifth is from a very noble Ambrosian hymn—the Aeterna Christi munera—of which Daniel says that it itself has been “wretchedly torn to pieces by the Church” (ab ecclesia miser e dilaceratum). The sixth and seventh stanzas are also Ambrosian—from the Jesu corona virginum. Thus this single hymn of seven stanzas is mere patchwork, gathered from that Ambrosian hymnody which the Breviaries supply. And finding all the rest of it credited to Ambrose and to his century, we are inclined to doubt that Hilary should be considered as the author of any portion at all.

Indeed the identification of Hilary’s hymns—except the Lucis largitor—is purely conjectural. It rests mainly on the hymnological acumen of Cardinal Thomasius, which may or may not be liable to error. Kayser refuses, on one ground or another, to positively endorse any, except the one which all now concede. Next to this in probability stands the Beata nobis gaudia (though it is doubted by Professor March), and then the Deus pater ingenite, which is taken from the Mozarabic Breviary. The Jam meta noctis transiit, the In matutinis surgimus, and the Jesu refulsit omnium, have only the authority of Thomasius. The Jesu quadragenariae, Daniel says, is an old hymn, but very certainly composed later than the time of Hilary. The Ad coeli clara we have already rejected. Thus we have one authentic and five conjectural Hilarian hymns. There is, however, great doubt resting on the Jesu refulsit omnium; and if I consulted merely my own judgment, I should declare against it, if only in view of the rhymes—a characteristic which it would scarcely possess if it were genuinely of the fourth century. And while we are upon this somewhat ungrateful duty of trying to set matters right, shall we pass over the slip which Mrs. Charles makes in her capital little book? (Christian Life in Song. Am. ed., p. 74.) For she says that “The Hilary who wrote the hymns was the canonized Bishop of Arles.” There was, much later, a Hilary of Arles; and there was another Hilary of Rome, and there were also others of the same name; but none of them wrote hymns. He of Arles assuredly did not.

Of our own Hilary it may be added that the rest of his life was earnest, but comparatively quiet. We shall find Gregory of Tours and Fortunatus asserting that he raised the dead and healed the sick, and cast out devils (some of them in the shape of snakes) from a boy’s stomach; but these stories belong naturally to a credulous and superstitious age. More to the purpose is it to find that the bishop had entered upon the composition of tunes for his hymns, and had taken up calligraphy and the ornamentation of manuscripts. There was a book of the Gospels found, on which was indorsed, “Quem scripsit Hilarius Pictavensis quondam sacerdos”—“which Hilary of Poitiers, formerly a priest, wrote.” A similar book was left by St. Perpetuus, Bishop of Tours, to Bishop Euphronius, Fortunatus’s friend. This is attested by his will, executed in 474. “I saw,” says Christian Druthmar (ninth century), “a book of the Gospels, written in Greek, which was said to have been St. Hilary’s, in which were Matthew and John,” etc. But whether Hilary wrote this is naturally an open question.

The good bishop died at Poitiers—as Jerome and Gregory of Tours declare—but the date is still a matter of some uncertainty. Valentinian and Valens were upon the throne, and it is safe to say that 367-68 was the year. January 14th has also been assigned by some authorities, but with no better reason than a generally received tradition to this effect, and the fact that this is his day in the Roman calendar. His body was, however, scattered rather widely. It was removed from its tomb in the time of Clovis—a bone of his arm was in Belgium, and some other portions of his anatomy were in Limoges. About the year 638, Dagobert is stated to have placed his remains in the Church of St. Dionysius, and so confident of this fact were the people of Poitiers, in 1394, that they vehemently asserted that they had his relics there in perfect safety. “Calvinistic heretics” were said to have burned the mortal remnants of the great “hammer of the Arians,” and the Pictavians took this method to meet the calumny. For aught we know to the contrary they were perfectly right, and the dust of their bishop is still resting peacefully in their midst.

For his works, the Paris edition of 1693 is the best; but the Patrologia of J. P. Migne contains all that any one can need or care to see. It is the full reprint of the Paris volumes, together with biographical and critical notes, in Latin, prepared with great diligence and research; but, of course, from the Roman Catholic point of view.

THE HYMNS OF HILARY.

I.
HYMNUS MATUTINUS.

1. Lucis largitor splendide,

Cujus sereno lumine

Post lapsa noctis tempora

Dies refusus panditur;

2. Tu verus mundi Lucifer,

Non is, qui parvi sideris

Venturae lucis nuntius

Angusto fulget lumine,

3. Sed toto sole clarior,

Lux ipse totus et dies,

Interna nostri pectoris

Illuminans praecordia:

4. Adesto, rerum conditor,

Paternae lucis gloria,

Cujus admota gratia

Nostra patescunt corpora;

5. Tuoque plena spiritu,

Secum Deum gestantia,

Ne rapientis perfidi

Diris patescant fraudibus,

6. Ut inter actus seculi

Vitae quos usus exigit,

Omni carentes crimine

Tuis vivamus legibus.

7. Probrosas mentis castitas

Carnis vincat libidines,

Sanctumque puri corporis

Delubrum servet Spiritus.

8. Haec spes precantis animae,

Haec sunt votiva munera,

Ut matutina nobis sit

Lux in noctis custodiam.

I.
A MORNING HYMN.

1. Thou splendid giver of the light,

By whose serene and lovely ray

Beyond the gloomy shades of night

Is opened wide another day!

2. Thou true Light-bearer of the earth,

Far more than he whose slender star,

Son of the morning, in its dearth

Of radiance sheds its beams afar!

3. But clearer than the sun may shine,

All light and day in Thee I find,

To fill my night with glory fine

And purify my inner mind.

4. Come near, Thou maker of the world,

Illustrious in thy Father’s light,

From whose free grace if we were hurled,

Body and soul were ruined quite.

5. Fill with Thy Spirit every sense,

That God’s divine and gracious love

May drive Satanic temptings hence,

And blight their falsehoods from above.

6. That in the acts of common toil

Which life demands from us each day,

We may, without a stain or soil,

Live in Thy holy laws alway.

7. Let chastity of mind prevail

To conquer every fleshly lust;

And keep Thy temple without fail,

O Holy Ghost, from filth and dust.

8. This hope is in my praying heart—

These are my vows which now I pay;

That this sweet light may not depart,

But guide me purely through the day.

II.
HYMNUS MATUTINUS.

1. Deus, Pater ingenite,

Et Fili unigenite,

Quos Trinitatis unitas

Sancto connectit Spiritu.

2. Te frustra nullus invocat,

Nec cassis unquam vocibus

Amator tui luminis

Ad coelum vultus erigit.

3. Et tu suspirantem, Deus,

Vel vota supplicantium,

Vel corda confitentium

Semper benignus aspice.

4. Nos lucis ortus admonet

Grates deferre debitas,

Tibique laudes dicere,

Quod nox obscura praeterit.

5. [Et] diem precamur bonum,

Ut nostros, Salvator, actus

Sinceritate perpeti

Pius benigne instruas.

II.
A MORNING HYMN.

1. Eternal Father, God,

And sole-begotten Son,

Who with the Holy Ghost

Art ever Three in One.

2. None calleth Thee in vain,

Nor yet with empty cry

Doth he who seeks Thy light

Lift up his gaze on high.

3. Do Thou, O God, behold

With mercy them that pray;

Receive their earnest vows

And take their guilt away.

4. The kindling sky forewarns

Our souls what praise we owe

To Him at whose command

The night has ceased below.

5. We ask a happy day,

That Thou shouldst guide our ways

In constant faithfulness,

O Saviour, to Thy praise!

III.
HYMNUS PENTECOSTALIS.

1. Beata nobis gaudia

Anni reduxit orbita,

Cum Spiritus paraclitus

Illapsus est discipulis.

2. Ignis vibrante lumine

Linguae figuram detulit,

Verbis ut essent proflui,

Et charitate fervidi.

3. Linguis loquuntur omnium;

Turbae pavent gentilium:

Musto madere deputant,

Quos Spiritus repleverat.

4. Patrata sunt haec mystice,

Paschae peracto tempore,

Sacro dierum circulo,

Quo lege fit remissio.

5. Te nunc, Deus piissime,

Vultu precamur cernuo:

Illapsa nobis coelitus

Largire dona Spiritus!

6. Dudum sacrata pectora

Tua replesti gratia,

Dimitte nostra crimina,

Et da quieta tempora!

III.
WHITSUNDAY HYMN.

1. What blessed joys are ours,

When time renews our thought

Of that true Comforter

On the disciples brought.

2. With light of quivering flame

In fiery tongues He fell,

And hearts were warm with love

And lips were quick to tell.

3. All tongues were loosened then,

And fear, in men, awoke

Before that mighty power

By which the Spirit spoke.

4. Achieved in mystic sign

Has been that paschal feast,

Whose sacred list of days

The soul from sin released.

5. Thee then, O holiest Lord,

We pray in humble guise

To give such heavenly gifts

Before our later eyes.

6. Fill consecrated breasts

With grace to keep Thy ways;

Show us forgiveness now,

And grant us quiet days.

IV.
HYMNUS MATUTINUS.

1. Jam meta noctis transiit,

Somni quies jam praeterit

Aurora surgit fulgida

Et spargit coelum lux nova.

2. Sed cum diei spiculum

Cernamus, hinc nos omnium

Ad te, superne Lucifer,

Preces necesse est fundere.

3. Te lucis sancte Spiritus

Et caritatis actibus

Ad instar illud gloriae

Nos innovatos effice.

4. Praesta Pater piissime

Patrique compar unice,

Cum Spiritu paraclito

Nunc et per omne saeculum.

IV.
A MORNING HYMN.

1. The limit of the night is passed,

The quiet hour of sleep has fled;

Far up the lance of dawn is cast;

New light upon the heaven is spread.

2. But when this sparkle of the day

Our eyes discern, then, Lord of light,

To Thee our souls make haste to pray

And offer all their wants aright.

3. O Holy Spirit, by the deeds

Of Thine own light and charity,

Renew us through our earthly needs

And cause us to be like to Thee.

4. Grant this, O Father ever blessed;

And Holy Son, our heavenly friend;

And Holy Ghost, Thou comfort best!

Now and until all time shall end.

CHAPTER IV.
POPE DAMASUS AND THE BEGINNING OF RHYME.

Contemporary with Hilary of Poitiers, but probably a younger man, as he survived him by seventeen years, was Damasus of Rome. Like many other Romans of the imperial period, he was a Spaniard by birth; or, at least, he was the son of a Spaniard who had removed to Rome and had become a deacon or presbyter of the church dedicated to the memory of the Roman martyr, St. Lawrence. Of his own earlier life we know very little. An extant epitaph records the fact that he had a sister who became a nun and died in her twentieth year. He himself served in the Church of St. Lawrence until his sixtieth year, when he was chosen Bishop of Rome; and in the accepted catalogue, which begins with the Apostle Peter, he ranks as the thirty-sixth bishop of the see.

He was chosen bishop in A.D. 366, because of the position he had taken with reference to the controversy which then agitated the diocese, and because of the firmness and weight of character he had displayed in the troubles of the years before his election. The great Christological controversy was agitating the Church of both East and West. The West was substantially in agreement with Athanasius, against both the Arians and the semi-Arians, and would have been entirely so but for the influence exerted by semi-Arian or Arian emperors and the courtly bishops of their party. Constantius, the last surviving son of Constantine the Great, was exceedingly zealous for the semi-Arian doctrine, which rejected the statement of our Lord’s substantial identity with His Father, but was willing to assert His substantial likeness. It was only the difference of an iota in a Greek word—ὁμοουσιος or ὁμοιουσιος—but if there ever was a case in which neither jot nor tittle must be allowed to pass away, it was this.

Liberius, who was elected Bishop of Rome in 352, was the victim of Constantius’s policy. In 353 the East and West were united under his rule, and that year at Arles, as in 355 at Milan, councils were called, in which the condemnation of Athanasius was procured by imperial blandishments. In the former the presbyter sent by Liberius to represent the Roman see subscribed with the majority. But in the second his three representatives obeyed their instructions, and accepted disfavor and exile rather than subscribe. Then Liberius himself was summoned to Milan, and the weight of imperial threats and persuasions was brought to bear upon him. He withstood both manfully, and demanded as a preliminary to any discussion of the charges against Athanasius, that the Nicene Creed should be subscribed by all parties, and the banished bishops returned to their sees. When given his choice between submission and exile, he chose the latter.

The Emperor now sought among the Roman clergy for a man to put into Liberius’s place. In Rome, as in most of the cities of the West, Arians were not to be found. But in the Deacon Felix the court party obtained a candidate who, while himself a Trinitarian, was willing to hold communion with the Arians, and presumably to condemn Athanasius. Of the details of his election and ordination little is known, but we find him installed in the Roman see with the vigorous support of the civil authority, although not with the assent of the Roman people. The great body of the Christians in Rome are said to have refused communion with him because he was tainted by communion with heretics; and when Constantius came to visit the city, he was besieged by the Christian ladies of the city with appeals for the restoration of Liberius.

In the mean time three years of exile to Thrace, where he was thrown of set purpose into constant association with bishops of the semi-Arian party, and isolated from his friends, had broken the spirit of Liberius. He was not a man of strong character, and, unfortunately for the theory of papal infallibility, he yielded. He signed a creed compiled for the occasion, which described Christ as of like substance with the Father, and condemned Athanasius.[1] He then was allowed to return to Rome, although Felix II. was still the recognized bishop. Constantius seems to have foreseen the difficulties which would attend the presence of the two bishops in the city, and he consented to the return of Liberius unwillingly. The body of the people and of the clergy at once rallied around Liberius, and rejected Felix altogether; and of this party was Damasus. But while they were willing to condone his weakness in the matter of condemning Athanasius, there was a party of more determined Athanasians who refused to do so, and the diocese now was divided between the three factions. That of Felix disappeared with his own death in 360 and the death of Constantius in 361. But the extreme Athanasians, although they did not attempt to set up a rival bishop while Liberius lived, perpetuated their party, and they probably received aid and comfort from a similar party which had arisen in the East, in opposition to the wiser and more charitable policy of Athanasius himself. This party was called the Luciferians, from Lucifer, Bishop of Cagliari, in Sardinia, who was in exile in the East at the time when this question was raised there after the death of Constantius.

In 367 Liberius died, and the schism at once showed itself in Rome. Damasus was chosen and ordained bishop in the regular form by the friends of Liberius, who were the great majority. But the Deacon Ursicinus was chosen by the Luciferian party, and ordained by bishops of that party in the basilica of St. Sicinus. Unfortunately the prefect of the city was a weak and ineffective man, who was quite unable to preserve peace between the two factions. It soon came to blows between them, and the pagan historian, Ammianus Marcellinus, tells us with what result:

“Damasus and Ursinus being eager beyond measure to secure possession of the bishop’s seat, carried on the conflict most bitterly and with divisive partisanship, their supporters carrying their quarrels to the point of inflicting death and wounds. As Juventius was unable either to suppress or abate these evils, he yielded to the violence and withdrew to the suburbs. And in the struggle Damasus overcame, as his party was the more determined of the two. It is admitted that in the basilica of Sicinus, which is a place of assemblage for Christian worship, there were found in one day one hundred and thirty-seven corpses of those who had been done to death; and also that the excitement of the populace abated slowly and with difficulty after the affair was over.”

“See how these Christians love one another!” was a comment made by pagans on the spirit which had prevailed in the earlier Church. They now might have said it ironically. It is impossible to acquit Damasus of all responsibility in the matter, as he was a man of eminent ability and influence, and might have put an end to these scenes of violence if he had exerted his authority. It is equally impossible to believe that he took any part in them. Then, as in the Reformation times, what John Knox calls “the raskill multitude” greatly enjoyed an opportunity to show how great their zeal for religion, in any other shape but that of obeying its precepts. “Set Jehu to pulling down idols,” said an old Puritan, “and see how zealous he can be.”

The schism did not end with the bloody struggle around the basilica of St. Sicinus. It is true that the civil authority now interposed and banished the bishop of the Luciferian party. But he afterward was allowed to return, and again the troubles revived and ceased only with his second banishment. Even when the Emperor Gratian gave Damasus the entire jurisdiction over the bishops and priests involved in the schism, with a view to the final suppression of these disputes, the extremists lingered on. After Ursicinus there was yet another Luciferian bishop of Rome; and by a curious freak of controversial zeal the memory of Felix was consecrated as that of an opponent of Liberius, and a mythical account of their relations was given currency, which has resulted in the elevation of Felix to the rank of “pope and martyr,” on the ground that Constantius had him beheaded for his loyalty to the Nicene faith![2]

Damasus made an excellent record in his see, after the abating of the troubles which attended his accession to it. He left no room for doubt as to his orthodoxy. For the first time since the great controversy broke out in Alexandria, the whole weight and influence of the great Roman see was thrown unreservedly and effectively on the Athanasian side. The accession of Valentinian (364-75) to the imperial authority in the West once more threw the weight of court influence on the other side; but intolerance was not carried to the same extent as by Constantius. At every stage of the discussion we find Damasus outspoken on behalf of the Nicene faith, and in support of Athanasius. In 368 he held a synod at Rome, in which the Illyrian bishops Ursacius and Valens, who were trying to Arianize the West, were condemned as heretics; and in 370 another in which the same condemnation was meted out to Auxentius, the Bishop of Milan. Before he died he saw the second General Council meet at Constantinople and lay the ban of the Church on all the compromises with Arianism.

The see of Rome already had become a place of great splendor and influence. “Make me Bishop of Rome,” the pagan senator Praetextatus said to him, “and I will be a Christian to-morrow.” Damasus seems to have enjoyed the pomp and show and opportunities for outlay and for influence which his position secured him. But there was much in his administration of his diocese which commends him to our sympathies and even our admiration. He seems to have been the first to have taken a genuine interest in the Catacombs—the great underground burial-places which are so rich in memorials of the Church’s primitive and martyr ages. He fostered their use as places of pilgrimage and reunion for the people of his own diocese and pilgrims from others. He constructed the staircases which made them accessible, the well-lights for their illumination and ventilation, and the chapels for collective worship. Here Christendom, in the day of its triumph, gathered to commemorate those who had been faithful when the Church was under the cross, and Prudentius in his Peristephanon has left us a lively picture of the eager multitudes who resorted thither on the festival days, some from Rome itself, others from the Etrurian and Sabine villages, thronging even the great roads to the city to their utmost capacity: “From early morn they press thither to greet the saints. The multitude comes and goes until evening. They kiss the polished plates of silver which cover the grave of the martyr. They offer incense, and tears of emotion stream from the eyes of all.”

When, after long centuries of forgetfulness, the Catacombs were reopened in 1578 by Antonio Bosio, traces of these pilgrimages were found in the graffiti or rude chalk-inscriptions left on the walls of the passages by the Italian peasants of the fourth and fifth centuries. There also were found the inscriptions in verse, composed by Damasus, and cut in stone by his friend, Furius Filocalus, who devised an ornamental alphabet for the purpose. In one of these Filocalus describes himself as one who “reverenced and loved Pope Damasus” (Damasi papae cultor atque amator).

Another side of his activity has been brought into light by more recent researches in Rome. Professor Lanciani says that to Damasus belongs also the honor of having founded the first public library of Christendom: “The finest libraries of the first centuries of Christendom were, of course, in Rome.... Such was the importance attributed to books in those early days of our faith that, in Christian basilicas, or places of worship, they were kept in the place of honor—next to the episcopal chair. Many of the basilicas which we discover from time to time, especially in the Campagna, have the apse trichora—that is, divided into three small hemicycles. The reason of this peculiar form was long sought in vain; but a recent discovery made at Hispalis proves that of the three hemicycles the central one contained the tribunal or episcopal chair, the one on the right the sacred implements, the one on the left the sacred books.

“The first building erected in Rome, under the Christian rule, for the study and preservation of books and documents, was the Archivum (Archives) of Pope Damasus. This just and enterprising pope, the last representative of good old Roman traditions as regards the magnificence and usefulness of his public structures, modelled his establishment on the pattern of the typical library at Pergamos; of which the Palatine Library in Rome had been the worthy rival. He began by raising in the centre a hall of basilical type, which he dedicated to St. Lawrence,” and which “was surrounded by a square portico, into which opened the rooms or cells containing the various departments of the archives and of the library.” A commemorative inscription, composed by Damasus himself, in hexameters, seven in number, was set in front of the building above the main entrance. The text has been discovered in a MS. formerly at Heidelberg, now in the Vatican. The first four hexameters do not bring out in a good light the poetical faculties of the worthy pontiff—in fact their real meaning has not yet been ascertained; but the last three verses are more intelligible:

‘Archibis, fateor, volui nova condere tecta;

Addere praeterea dextra laevaque columnas,

Quae Damasi teneant proprium per saecula nomen.’

“Around the apse of the inner hall there was another distich of about the same poetical value, the text of which has been discovered in a MS. at Verdun:

‘Haec Damasi tibi, Christe Deus, nova tecta levavi

Laurenti saeptus martyris auxilio.’

“Mention of Damasus’s Archives is frequently made in the documents of the fourth and fifth centuries. Jerome calls them chartarium ecclesiae Romanae.”[3]

But a still more lasting monument of his fame is the Latin Vulgate, which he incited Jerome—as the English-speaking world calls Sophronius Eusebius Hieronymus—to prepare for the Church of the West. From a very early time Latin translations of the Scriptures from the Greek version of the Old Testament and the Greek original of the New Testament had been in existence. But although there were two well recognized types of these early versions—the Italian and the African—there was so little uniformity that there were “almost as many versions as copies.” Jerome was a man of classical culture and a close student of the Scriptures, which he could read in Hebrew as well as in Greek and Latin. He came to Rome from Syria in 382, to ask the aid of Damasus in behalf of the Luciferian schism at Antioch—a matter in which the Bishop of Rome hardly could meddle. Even before his arrival he had been in correspondence with Damasus and had written for him an exposition of the vision of the Seraphim in Isaiah 6. Damasus called a synod in which the schism at Antioch was discussed, but no result reached. It is said that in this synod he exhorted Jerome to take up the work of giving the Church a good Latin version of the Bible. A ninth-century writer says he put him in charge of the Archivum, or public library, described by Professor Lanciani. Later writers speak of him, without much warrant, as Damasus’s secretary. It seems probable that Damasus regarded him as a desirable man for the bishopric when his own death should leave it vacant. But when his death came in 384, the Dalmatian scholar was passed over, perhaps because he was not a Roman, and a much smaller man than either Damasus or Jerome was chosen instead. So Jerome went back to the East and established himself at Bethlehem. Between 382 and 404 he completed his version of the Scriptures, which is of especial importance to the student of Latin hymnology, as it stands in much the same relation to the Latin hymns of the fifth and later centuries as does the English Bible to the English hymn-writers. It controls their vocabulary and explains their allusions.

As a poet Damasus does not take very high rank. We have seen Professor Lanciani’s opinion of his inscriptions. Some forty poems are attributed to him, but only a very few of these concern us here. In the Cottonian MSS. there is a copy of rhymed “Verses of Damasus to his Friend” (Versus Damasi ad Amicum suum), which would be interesting to us if we were sure that Sir Alexander Croke is right in assuming that this is our Damasus. But the name “Rainalde” in the first line would hardly occur in a Latin poem by a Roman author of the fourth century.

There is no reason, however, to call in question the two hymns—one to the Martyr Agatha and the other to the Apostle Andrew—which are ascribed to him in the collections. And the former is especially remarkable as being the oldest hymn in which rhyme is employed intentionally and throughout. Of course if it were true that Hilary wrote the Jesu refulsit omnium or the Jesu quadrigenariae, which sometimes are printed as his, we should be obliged to assign to him the honor thus claimed for Damasus. But the preponderance of evidence and of presumption is against ascribing these hymns to him. Koch assigns the latter to the fifth century and not to the fourth. Mone ascribes the former to one of the early Irish hymn-writers, whose name is lost to us. He finds in it a tendency to alliterative construction, which indicates either Celtic or Teutonic authorship; and he is decided for the former by the mixture of Greek words, which was a favorite practice with the Irish hymn writers. Also the metrical form is one affected by them. On these grounds it is fair to claim that the hymn of Damasus marks the introduction of end-rhymes into the Latin hymns.

Rhyme was by no means unknown in the poetry of the Greeks and the Romans. But in languages which occupied that stage of grammatical development in which the relations of words are expressed by terminations, the resemblances in these were so numerous and so constant that rhyme must have appeared rather a cheap form for poetry. So in this stage we find the Southern Aryans of Europe employing the quantity of syllables and those of Northern Europe the coincidences of initial sounds (stabreim or alliteration) and assonance in their verse. It was when the development of languages substituted auxiliary and connecting words for terminations that the coincidences of final sounds became so much a source of pleasure to the ear as to justify their continuous employment for that purpose.

But besides the occasional occurrence of rhyme in classic poetry—as in Virgil’s famous jeu d’ esprit,

“Sic vos non vobis edificatis aves,” etc.—

there seems to have existed forms of popular Latin verse in which rhyme and accent held the place which quantity held in classic poetry. It is this popular form of verse which the Church’s hymns began to reproduce, just as they also in many cases are written in that lingua rustica, or countrified speech of the peasantry of Italy and France, which was to become the basis of the Romance languages. It is a matter of dispute whether the Saturnian verse-form, to whose early prevalence and prolonged existence among the classes not pervaded by Greek culture Horace alludes, was based on an accentual scansion or merely on a numbering of syllables and a rude approach to quantity. The general consensus of scholars is that the Saturnian metres were based on accent, and that rhyme, which is the natural and invariable product of the accentual scansion, was also in use.[4]

So this hidden current of rhymed and accented poetry of the common people rose to light again after many ages in the hymns of the Western Church. Thus Damasus brings us to the parting of the ways. In Hilary, Ambrose and his school, Prudentius, Ennodius, Fortunatus, Elpis, Gregory, and Bede we have the perpetuation of the classic tradition of quantitative verse in the service of Christendom and for the ear of the cultivated classes. And while that tradition expires in the Middle Ages, we see it revive again in the sacred poets of the Renaissance—in Zacharius Ferrari, George Fabricius, Marcus Antonius Muretus, Famiano Strada and the other revisers of the Roman Breviary, the two Santeuls in the Breviary of Clugny, and Charles Coffin in the Paris Breviary. But Damasus stands at the head of a still more illustrious line. Catching, perhaps, from the Etruscan and Sabine peasants, who thronged the Catacombs on the day when the Martyr Agatha was commemorated, the accents of the popular poetry, he became the founder of the tradition which lives in the broader current of Latin sacred song. In this line of succession we find already a few of the Ambrosian hymns, and then a long series in which the two Bernards, Adam of St. Victor, Thomas of Celano, Thomas Aquinas, and Bonaventura are the most illustrious names. And as indeed the tradition of accent and rhyme seems to have made its way into the literature of the modern world through the Latin hymns, Dante and all the great poets who have illustrated its power to give pleasure might be said to belong here.

The hymn in commemoration of the Martyr Agatha—whose story of suffering and triumph had seized on the imagination of the people as did those of the martyrs Cecilia and Sebastian—we give with the English version of the Rev. J. Anketell, which he has kindly permitted us to use.

Martyris ecce dies Agathae

Virginis emicat eximiae,

Christus eam Sibi qua sociat,

Et diadema duplex decorat.

Stirpe decens, elegans specie,

Sed magis actibus atque fide:

Terrea prospera nil reputans

Jussa Dei sibi corde ligans.

Fortior haec trucibusque viris

Exposuit sua membra flagris,

Pectore quam fuerit valido

Torta mamilla docet patulo.

Deliciae cui carcer erat,

Pastor ovem Petrus hanc recreat,

Laetior inde magisque flagrans

Cuncta flagella cucurrit ovans.

Ethnica turba rogum fugiens,

Hujus et ipsa meretur opem:

Quos fidei titulus decorat,

His Venerem magis ipsa premat.

Jam renitens quasi sponsa polo,

Pro misero rogitet Damaso,

Sic sua festa coli faciat,

Se celebrantibus ut faveat.

Gloria cum Patre sit Genito,

Spirituique proinde sacro,

Qui Deus unus et omnipotens

Hanc nostri faciat memorem.

Fair as the morn in the deep blushing East,

Dawns the bright day of Saint Agatha’s feast;

Christ who has borne her from labor to rest,

Crowns her as Virgin and Martyr most blest.

Noble by birth and of beautiful face,

Richer by far in her deeds and her grace,

Earth’s fleeting honors and gains she despised,

God’s holy will and commandments she prized.

Braver and nobler than merciless foes,

Willing her limbs to the scourge to expose;

Weakly she sank not by anguish oppressed,

When cruel torture destroyed her fair breast.

Then her dark dungeon was filled with delight,

Peter the shepherd refreshed her by night;

Forth to her tortures rejoicing she went,

Thanking her God for the trials he sent.

Barbarous pagans, escaping their doom,

Honor her virtues that brighten their gloom;

They whom the title of faith hath adorned,

Like her, earth’s possessions and pleasures have scorned.

Radiant and glorious, a heavenly bride,

She to the Lord for the wretched hath cried;

So in her honor your praises employ,

That ye too may share in her triumph and joy.

Praise to the Father and praise to the Son,

Praise to the Spirit, the blest Three in One;

God of all might in Heaven’s glory arrayed,

Praise for thy grace in thy servant displayed.

It will be observed that Mr. Anketell, in the second line of the sixth verse, follows the reading preferred by Daniel: Pro miseris supplica Domino, which omits the Pope’s name. But it seems much more unlikely that this line should be altered to the line as given above, than that the contrary change should have been made. Emendators generally pass from the concrete to the vague, from the specific to the general.

CHAPTER V.
AMBROSE.

It would appear that the Ambrosian hymns obtained much of their earliest recognition in Spain. At least so runs the statement of Cardinal Thomasius, who edited the Mozarabic (Spanish) Breviary. He says: “It is not doubtful that in the seventh century of the Church, when the Spanish Church especially flourished, the Ambrosian hymns were everywhere in vogue.” The Concilium Agathense (Council of Agde in Southern France, A.D. 506), which concerned itself chiefly with matters of discipline, ordained that hymns should be sung morning and evening, and at the conclusion of matins, vespers, and masses. These and similar enactments had reference to the body of hymns which had received the name of the Bishop of Milan. Then, as now, they formed the true fragrant cedar-heart of the old psalmody, and it is from their structure that the Council of Toledo (633) drew its famous definition. The Council said: “Proprie autem hymni sunt continentes laudem Dei. Si ergo sit laus, et non sit Dei, non est hymnus. Si sit et laus Dei laus [sic] et non cantatur non est hymnus. Si ergo laudem Dei dicitur et cantatur, tunc est hymnus.” That is to say: “Hymns properly contain the praise of God. If therefore there be praise, but not of God, this is no hymn. If there be praise, praise of God, but not capable of being sung, this is no hymn. If therefore the praise of God be both composed and sung, it is then a hymn.”

The author who is thus honored as the first great leader of the Church’s praise was born at Treves, in Gaul, about the year 340 (or, as some say, 334). His father was a Roman noble who became praetorian prefect of the province of Gallia Narbonensis; and as Hither Gaul was an important region, it can be easily seen that the young Ambrose was reared in the midst of wealth and power. His mother was a learned woman and he naturally imbibed letters as he grew up. A tradition, which is probably based on fact, assures us that even in his cradle he was marked for fame. A swarm of bees came down upon him, and the amazed nurse saw them clustered about his very mouth without harming him. This was the same prodigy which had been related of Plato, and hence his parents imagined a high destiny for the lad. It was indeed a singular and suggestive commentary on his future life. He preserved his equanimity amid a great deal of buzzing; and the sweetness of his speech won to him no less a convert than the great Augustine. His entire career was worthy of the sainted Sotheria, his ancestress, who was martyred for the faith under Diocletian.

He appears to us a man of both character and conscience. His education was given him at Rome, and his brother Satyrus and himself went to Milan to practice at the bar. His success as a pleader was great. He became first assessor to the prefect with the rank of Consularis, whose headquarters were now at Milan; and subsequently he took charge of Liguria and Emilia. For in 369 we find him, by appointment of the Emperor Valentinian, prefect of Upper Italy and Milan. His position is sometimes styled that of “consular,” sometimes that of “governor,” and sometimes that of “praetor” or imperial president, which last perhaps the easiest designation for modern ears and carries the plainest meaning with it.

Now Milan was the capital of Liguria and it was the business of the praetor to preside in the stead of the Emperor over the choice of a bishop. Auxentius, an Arian, who had held this office, died in 374 and a new election was necessary. This was not an easy matter, for the feud between the Catholics and the Arians was at fever-heat, and rioting and bloodshed were very certain to occur.

The praetor called to mind the advice of Probus, prefect of Italy, who had once charged him to administer the affairs of his region “like a bishop.” He therefore tried to cast oil upon the waters. His genial gravity and calm serenity of spirit aided the impression he meant to produce. Both factions gazed upon him with delight. His attitude was so unpartisan as to charm everybody, and it was very natural that this eloquent representative of the Emperor should carry the suffrages of the throng. And just when the interest was most intense and the confidence greatest, a child cried out, “Let Ambrose be bishop,” and the crowd caught the contagion at once.

In later days it was maliciously said that Ambrose had himself contrived this scene with an eye to the stage effect—that for all his apparent humility the coming bishop set store by the office and wanted to obtain it—that, in short, his reluctance to receive it and even his precipitate flight from the city were prearranged! More than this, it has been asserted that the various schemes and subterfuges to avoid becoming bishop were known to and abetted by his friends, who were of the orthodox party and desired to have their candidate elected. The best reply that can be given is the character of the man himself. Such a person must have entertained the highest reverence for such an office. In his administration of its cares and duties he showed a conscious supremacy over every worldly consideration. In his final acceptance of it he evinced no less of self-denial than of sincerity. And it is incredible that so mighty a mind as that of Augustine could have been caught by the glittering emptiness of a hypocritical or self-seeking nature. We may well charge these calumnies to their proper sources—those, namely, of disappointed ambition or of envious malignity.

The record of this endeavor to escape office reads singularly enough. He first put some criminals to the torture, hoping by this means to shock the people through his hard-hearted justice. When this would not do he avowed philosophic rather than Christian sentiments. Having again failed, he welcomed some very profligate persons—men and women—to his palace in a way to invite scandal. This expedient being also detected he actually escaped from the city by night, but lost his way and found himself in front of the gates when morning dawned. This being his fourth unavailing effort, he fled to a friend’s house in the country, begging that he might lie hidden there until the first rush of feeling had been stemmed and he could hope for calmer consideration of his refusal. But the friend immediately betrayed him for his own good, and this well-meant treachery fastened the mitre firmly on his brow. Basil the Great gloried in this new coadjutor; and at the age of thirty-four or thereabouts, he himself became convinced that he could struggle no longer against his fate.

It was thus that Ambrose finally assumed the episcopate, and it was soon evident that this catechumen—for he had not even been previously baptized—respected its dignities and meant that others should be of the same mind as himself. He gave up his private fortune, selling his large estates and personal property, and reserving from them only a proper allowance to his sister Marcellina, who had early taken the vow of virginity. He associated with this proceeding the most strict method of living. “He accepted no invitations to banquets; took dinner only on Sunday, Saturday, and the festivals of celebrated martyrs; devoted the greater part of the night to prayer, to the hitherto necessarily neglected study of the Scriptures and the Greek fathers and to theological writing; preached every Sunday and often in the week; was accessible to all, most accessible to the poor and needy; and administered his spiritual oversight, particularly his instruction of catechumens, with the greatest fidelity.”

This is the character, admirably condensed, of a model bishop. To its fulfilment it requires the fervent piety of a true Christian and the constant zeal of an acute student together with the large prudence of a man of affairs. All these are abundantly found in Ambrose. And if it happened that in other and worse times his assertion of the spiritual independence of a bishop gave a foundation for what became the authority of the pope, it may be properly retorted that for him not to have done so then would have prevented many another better thing in later ages.

He was a more polished scholar than Hilary, and a more devout Christian than Damasus. Hence it was that his energy and skill contributed largely to the success of the Nicene orthodoxy in the West. Those times were troublous, and a cheerful and sunshiny temper like that of Ambrose was a vast auxiliary to the cause. He had been consecrated in 374, eight days after his election; and in 382 he presided at the synod in Aquileia which deposed Palladius and Secundianus, the Arian bishops. By so doing, and by his general attitude, he incurred the anger of Justina, whose son, the younger Valentinian, he always upheld and shielded. The Empress, however, determined to deal with him a good deal as Ahab’s wife dealt with Elijah. This comparison takes additional point from the use which Ambrose himself made of the story of Naboth in his defence of the Portian Church.

He had already encountered the smouldering idolatry of old Rome, headed by the rhetorician, Symmachus; but the eloquence of Ambrose had borne down all opposition and that conflict was now at an end. A vindictive woman was, however, a greater danger than a clever orator, and he found this true when Justina, the Empress-mother, allied herself with the heretical Arians. His pious zeal was kindled in a moment. Give up churches to such a schismatic set as these? Never!

It was at Easter in the year 386 that the Portian Church and its holy vessels were demanded for the use of the other party. Then stood up both the old Roman and the new Christian in the single person of the Bishop of Milan. He compared the demand to that of Ahab for Naboth’s vineyard; and it may well be supposed that with the rush of such a torrent of speech a current of inference was also borne along which involved Justina herself. The sermon, which has survived to us, was preached on Palm Sunday, and in it he said that he would hold every religious edifice against heresy to the very death. Let them take his property; let them depose or destroy himself; let them do their worst—but for his part he would stand there unshaken for the truth. He would not incite riot and confusion, but he would not yield. It was the anticipation of Luther’s “Hier stehe ich, ich kann nicht anders! Gott helfe mir!” For Ambrose proclaimed, almost in these actual words, “Here I stand, I cannot do otherwise. God help me!”

He made one magnificent point in this discourse—the focal centre it was of the entire outburst of eloquent declamation. It was when he quoted what our Lord Himself had said. “Yes,” cries Ambrose, “give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, but give to God what is God’s. Is the Church the property of Caesar? Never! It belongs unalterably to God. For God, then, it shall be kept. It shall never be surrendered to Caesar.”

The fight was really a siege. The sacred character of the churches protected their defenders. Ambrose invigorated the multitude who flocked to help him, and who organized relief parties to keep possession by day and by night. To relieve the monotony of their watches, he frequently addressed them words of encouragement. His fine equanimity triumphed over the impending disaster. He taught the people there and then the hymns of the early Church. He composed tunes and instructed them in singing. And when at last he was able to discover the bodies of Gervasius and Protasius, the ancient martyrs, he kindled in the spirits of his hearers such a fire that the popular voice was heeded even by the throne itself, and Justina was defeated and gave up the struggle. The court actually retreated before the authority of the Church. And from that moment, and that other memorable moment when he arraigned Theodosius, Ambrose delivered the power of the bishop’s crozier from any interference coming from the Emperor’s sceptre. Those were the days when the pastoral staff might be of wood, but the man who wielded it was of pure gold.

This account needs the story of Theodosius to be immediately attached to it in order to make it stand out in its true relation to the character of Ambrose. The bishop met three great enemies during his career. First appeared Idolatry, championed by Symmachus; then followed Heresy, championed by Justina; and now came Despotism, behind which stood the beloved Theodosius, the Emperor-pupil, with his hands red from the massacre of Thessalonica. The facts were these: a tumult had arisen in the circus at that place; Botheric, an imperial officer, had been killed; and the Emperor had in revenge put very many people to death. Some have even run the figures up to the incredible altitude of thirty thousand, and the massacre has been always regarded as involving seven thousand victims at the lowest estimate. It was a brutal and a horrible act, and Ambrose came out as Nathan did before David and denounced it with the most withering reproaches. The Emperor cowered and bent before this sirocco of the truth. The speaker was poised so high above him in the assured calm of a steady rectitude that Theodosius could do nothing except yield. And yield he did; and for eight months he paid penance before he was restored. It was the penance of the German Henry which hastened the Reformation; it was the humiliation of Theodosius which preserved both rights and dignities to the Church.

There is another side of Ambrose, and one on which Protestants will love to dwell. While his great disciple Augustine lent the weight of his authority to the doctrine that civil constraint might be used to bring men to orthodox beliefs, Ambrose always denounced that. When Valentinian II. sent him to Trier to negotiate with the rebel Maximus, in the winter of 383-84, Ambrose—like his contemporary, Martin of Tours—refused to have any communion with the bishops who recognized Maximus as Emperor, not on political grounds, but because they had obtained the execution of certain Spanish Priscillianists for heresy. This was the first blood-stain on the white garments of the Church—the first in the long line of such sins against the Word and Spirit of Christ. Yet Adrian VI. appealed to it as a precedent against Luther, and described the usurper as one of “the ancient and pious emperors.” In this he followed the example of his infallible predecessor, Leo I., who, in 447, declared there would be an end of all law, human and divine, if such heretics were allowed to live!

As an orator and writer, Ambrose’s strength lay in the simple direct plunge of his sentences, wide and grand and forceful as the launching of a great bowlder down a mountain path. And Mr. Simcox has noticed that the words which are used to describe his rhetorical power are almost all derived from eloqui. The other assemblage of expressions, drawn from disertus and the like, refer to the logical or learned weight of an argument. But what struck every one in the case of Ambrose was that he let the truth come mightily, just as he felt and believed it, with a swing and a vigor which was the outburst of his own majestic soul. It was this which won his victories. It was this power of sincerity which made him the counsellor of Theodosius and the instructor of Gratian as well as the guardian of Valentinian II. It was this unshrinking forwardness of movement which led him to oppose the rebuilding of the Jews’ synagogue; they had denied the Lord Jesus—let their house burn! But a victory more Christian was gained when thirty days of respite were fixed by his intercession between the sentence and execution of criminals. And although the defence of “Virginity,” as Ambrose conducted it, was the mainspring of the conventual idea, and was afterward vigorously used for that purpose, it is again plain that he advocated what he believed and what he himself devoutly practised. He shines upon us, from every angle of vision, as a character most pure, serene, and brave.

The siege in the basilica at Milan had an important bearing on the whole future of the Christian Church. Augustine tells us how his mother Monica had followed him to Milan, and how when there “she hastened the more eagerly to the church and hung upon the lips of Ambrose.” (Aug. Conf., B. vi.) “That man,” he continues, “she loved as an angel of God because she knew that by him I had been brought to that doubtful state of faith I now was in.” She evidently anticipated that so eloquent a preacher would complete the work that he had been permitted to begin. As for Augustine himself, he felt “shut out both from his ear and speech by multitudes of busy people whose weaknesses he served.”

How finely, by the way, this very expression illustrates the greatness of Ambrose’s character and the unselfishness of his life! We get also a picture of the man as a student—one whose voice would become worn by any extended public speaking, and who therefore read to himself in his private studies in a manner unusual apparently in that age—namely, as we do now, without opening his lips or articulating the words. The effect of Justina’s persecution is also given most graphically. (Aug. Conf., B. ix.) For Augustine, having first told us how these heavenly voices fell upon his ear, says that his mother “bore a chief part of those anxieties and watchings” and “lived for prayer.” At this date, he emphatically declares, “it was first instituted that after the manner of the Eastern churches, hymns and psalms should be sung lest the people should wax faint through the tediousness of sorrow; and from that day to this the custom is retained, divers (yea, almost all) congregations throughout other parts of the world following herein.” It is he, moreover, who tells us that the two martyrs’ bodies were transferred to that Ambrosian church erected in 387, and where afterward were placed the bones of its great founder; which was spared by Barbarossa in 1162, and which, as the church of San Ambrogio, still occupies its old site in Milan. Thus we have the most important of contemporary testimony to some of these troublous scenes.

Of the Ambrosian hymns themselves a great deal may be said. It is better to confine one’s self rather, therefore, to results than to the long processes which have led thither. But it is impossible to agree with Dr. Neale and Archbishop Trench, who say of them that “there is a certain coldness in them—an aloofness of the author from his subject.” This is one of those bits of critical misapprehension which lead us to doubt the infallibility of even so admirable a judgment as that of the warden of Sackville College. The truth is that Dr. Neale admired gorgeousness and the splendor of ritual. He praises the Pange lingua of Aquinas altogether too much and he praises Ambrose altogether too little. A simple and reverent spirit cannot be said to experience, as he does, a “feeling of disappointment” before this which he calls “an altar of unhewn stone.” This single phrase exposes the delusion. “Unhewn stone” is not to Dr. Neale’s nor to Archbishop Trench’s churchly taste, while it is precisely upon such an altar as that (Ex. 20:25) that God was ready to let His flame descend. The latest judgment—that of Mr. Simcox—(Latin Literature, vol. ii., 405) is decidedly preferable: “They all have the character of deep, spontaneous feeling, flowing in a clear, rhythmical current, and show a more genuine literary feeling than the prose works.” To any one who is at all familiar with the Ambrosian hymns this will at once commend itself as the better criticism.

We may pause a moment to inquire about the chants which bear his name, but we shall have slight enough information. Four tunes are traditional: the Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian, and Mixed Lydian. What these were and how they were sung, we do not accurately know. We do know, however, that Ambrose employed but four notes (the tetrachord) where we have subdivided the various tones into the octave. The Germans do not profess to tell us anything more definite than this.

The actual hymns are to be reckoned up in several ways. First comes the mass of Ambrosiani, including hymns of Gregory the Great and of other and much later authors. Many have been foisted into this category because they were found in old breviaries and manuscripts. Then from these we may separate the presumed originals—of which a large proportion are now known to belong to other writers. These misapprehensions are due to such compilers as Fabricius, Cassander, Clichtove, and Thomasius, who were not invariably correct and who perpetuated their designations through later works. Still a third class are the possible originals, selected by the judicious but not always accurate zeal of the Benedictines of St. Maur when they edited the collected works of the great bishop. And last of all can be placed the probable originals—those hymns which are authenticated by Augustine and by St. Caelestin (A.D. 430), together with those in structure closely resembling them.

For our own purposes a fifth class can even yet be formed from the last named group—the undoubted originals, which will comprise only those attested by contemporary authority.

The list would stand then in the order of authenticity, about as follows: