nteresting
letters, of which two hundred and forty still remain. Indeed, his
influence seemed to increase with his absence from the capital; and this
his enemies beheld with the rage which Napoleon felt for Madame de Stael
when he had banished her to within forty leagues of Paris. So a fresh
order from the Government doomed him to a still more dreary solitude, on
the utmost confines of the Roman Empire, on the coast of the Euxine,
even the desert of Pityus. But his feeble body could not sustain the
fatigues of this second journey. He was worn out with disease, labors,
and austerities; and he died at Comono, in Pontus,--near the place where
Henry Martin died,--in the sixtieth year of his age, a martyr, like
greater men than he.

Nevertheless this martyrdom, and at the hands of a Christian emperor,
filled the world with grief. It was only equalled in intensity by the
martyrdom of Becket in after ages. The voice of envy was at last hushed;
one of the greatest lights of the Church was extinguished forever.
Another generation, however, transported his remains to the banks of the
Bosporus, and the emperor--the second Theodosius--himself advanced to
receive them as far as Chalcedon, and devoutly kneeling before his
coffin, even as Henry II. kneeled at the shrine of Becket, invoked the
forgiveness of the departed saint for the injustice and injuries he had
received. His bones were interred with extraordinary pomp in the tomb of
the apostles, and were afterwards removed to Rome, and deposited, still
later, beneath a marble mausoleum in a chapel of Saint Peter, where they
still remain.

Such were the life and death of the greatest pulpit orator of Christian
antiquity. And how can I describe his influence? His sermons, indeed,
remain; but since we have given up the Fathers to the Catholics, as if
they had a better right to them than we, their writings are not so well
known as they ought to be,--as they will be, when we become broader in
our views and more modest of our own attainments. Few of the Protestant
divines, whom we so justly honor, surpassed Chrysostom in the soundness
of his theology, and in the learning with which he adorned his sermons.
Certainly no one of them has equalled him in his fervid, impassioned,
and classic eloquence. He belongs to the Church universal. The great
divines of the seventeenth century made him the subject of their
admiring study. In the Middle Ages he was one of the great lights of the
reviving