e
until he died, had he been less austere and censorious. Yet we should
remember that the asceticism which is so repulsive to us, and with
reason, and which marked the illustrious saints of the fourth century,
was simply the protest against the almost universal materialism of the
day,--that dreadful moral blight which was undermining society. As
luxury and extravagance and material pleasures were the prominent evils
of the old Roman world in its decline, it was natural that the protest
against these evils should assume the greatest outward antagonism.
Luxury and a worldly life were deemed utterly inconsistent with a
preacher of righteousness, and were disdained with haughty scorn by the
prophets of the Lord, as they were by Elijah and Elisha in the days of
Ahab. "What went ye out in the wilderness to see?" said our Lord, with
disdainful irony,--"a man clothed in soft raiment? They that wear soft
clothing are in king's houses,"--as much as to say, My prophets, my
ministers, rejoice not in such things.

So Chrysostom could never forget that he was a minister of Christ, and
was willing to forego the trappings and pleasures of material life
sooner than abdicate his position as a spiritual dictator. The secular
historians of our day would call him arrogant, like the courtiers of
Arcadius, who detested his plain speaking and his austere piety; but the
poor and unimportant thought him as humble as the rich and great thought
him proud. Moreover, he was a foe to idleness, and sent away from court
to their distant sees a host of bishops who wished to bask in the
sunshine of court favor, or revel in the excitements of a great city;
and they became his enemies. He deposed others for simony, and they
became still more hostile. Others again complained that he was
inhospitable, since he would not give up his time to everybody, even
while he scattered his revenues to the poor. And still others
entertained towards him the passion of envy,--that which gives rancor to
the _odium theologicum_, that fatal passion which caused Daniel to be
cast into the lions' den, and Haman to plot the ruin of Mordecai; a
passion which turns beautiful women into serpents, and learned
theologians into fiends. So that even Chrysostom was assailed with
danger. Even he was not too high to fall.

The first to turn against the archbishop was the Lord High
Chamberlain,--Eutropius,--the minister who had brought him to
Constantinople. This vulgar-minded man expect