ces and in face of death, to make a
propitiation for a life of greediness and usurious grindings, by an
unjust disposition of his fortune to the Church. Possibly he had doubts
whether any money would benefit the Church which was obtained by wicked
arts, or had been originally gained by injustice and hard-heartedness.

Thus does Saint Ambrose come down to us from antiquity,--great in his
feats of heroism, great as an executive ruler of the Church, great in
deeds of benevolence, rather than as orator, theologian, or student.
Yet, like Chrysostom, he preached every Sunday, and often in the week
besides, and his sermons had great power on his generation. When he died
in 397 he left behind him even a rich legacy of theological treatises,
as well as some fervid, inspiring hymns, and an influence for the better
in the modes of church music, which was the beginning of the modern
development of that great element in public worship. As a defender of
the faith by his pen, he may have yielded to greater geniuses than he;
but as the guardian of the interests of the Church, as a stalwart giant,
who prostrated the kings of the earth before him and gained the first
great battles of the spiritual over the temporal power, Ambrose is
worthy to be ranked among the great Fathers, and will continue to
receive the praises of enlightened Christendom.

AUTHORITIES.

Life of Ambrose, by his deacon, Paulinus; Theodoret; Tillemont's
Memoires Ecclesiastique, tom. x; Baronius; Zosimus; the Epistles of
Ambrose; Butler's Lives of the Saints; Biographie Universelle; Gibbon's
Decline and Fall. Milman has only a very brief notice of this great
bishop, the founder of sacerdotalism in the Latin Church. Neander's and
the standard Church Histories. There are some popular biographical
sketches in the encyclopedias, but no classical history of this prelate,
in English, with which I am acquainted. The French writers are the best.

SAINT AUGUSTINE.

* * * * *

A.D. 354-430.

CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY.

The most intellectual of all the Fathers of the Church was doubtless
Saint Augustine. He is the great oracle of the Latin Church. He directed
the thinking of the Christian world for a thousand years. He was not
perhaps so learned as Origen, nor so critical as Jerome; but he was
broader, profounder, and more original than they, or any other of the
great lights who shed the radiance of genius on the crumbling fabric of
the ancie