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ese powers and with the pontifical blessing, he took his departure from the holy city, well stored with the necessary ornaments and utensils for the performance of the ecclesiastical rites, besides a number of books to instruct the heathens and to solace his mind amidst the cares and anxieties of his travels. After some few years the fruits of his labor became manifest, and in 723 he had baptized vast multitudes in the true faith. His success was perhaps unparalleled in the early annals of the church, and remind us of the more recent wonders wrought by the Jesuit missionaries in India.[259] Elated with these happy results, far greater than even his sanguine mind had anticipated, he sent a messenger to the Pope to acquaint his holiness of these vast acquisitions to his flock, and soon after he went himself to Rome to receive the congratulations and thanks of the Pontiff; he was then made bishop, and entrusted with the ecclesiastical direction of the new church. After his return, he spent many years in making fresh converts and maintaining the discipline of the faithful. But all these labors and these anxieties were terminated by a cruel and unnatural death; on one of his expeditions he was attacked by a body of pagans, who slew him and nearly the whole of his companions, but it is not here that a Christian must look for his reward--he must rest his hopes on the benevolence and mercy of his God in a distant and far better world. He who would wish to trace more fully these events, and so catch a glimpse of the various incidents which touch upon the current of his life, must not keep the monk constantly before his mind, he must sometimes forget him in that capacity and regard him as a _student_, and that too in the highest acceptation of the term. His youthful studies, which I have said before were pursued with unconquerable energy, embraced grammar, poetry, rhetoric, history, and the exposition of the Holy Scriptures; the Bible, indeed, he read unceasingly, and drew from it much of the vital truth with which it is inspired; but he perhaps too much tainted it with traditional interpretation and patristical logic. A student's life is always interesting; like a rippling stream, its unobtrusive gentle course is ever pleasing to watch, and the book-worms seems to find in it the counterpart of his own existence. Who can read the life and letters of the eloquent Cicero, or the benevolent Pliny, without the deepest interest; or mark
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