ions. If we
could get into the habit of thinking more of our own corruptions and
more of _their_ virtues, we should have a better chance of learning
the true laws alike of art and destiny. But, the safest way of all, is
to assure ourselves that true knowledge of any thing or any creature
is only of the good of it; that its nature and life are in that, and
that what is diseased,--that is to say, unnatural and mortal,--you
must cut away from it in contemplation, as you would in surgery.

Of the six tutor nations, two, the Tuscan and Arab, have no effect on
early Christian England. But the Roman, Greek, Syrian, and Egyptian
act together from the earliest times; you are to study the influence
of Rome upon England in Agricola, Constantius, St. Benedict, and
St. Gregory; of Greece upon England in the artists of Byzantium and
Ravenna; of Syria and Egypt upon England in St. Jerome, St. Augustine,
St. Chrysostom, and St. Athanase.

St. Jerome, in central Bethlehem; St. Augustine, Carthaginian by
birth, in truth a converted Tyrian, Athanase, Egyptian, symmetric and
fixed as an Egyptian aisle; Chrysostom, golden mouth of all; these
are, indeed, every one teachers of all the western world, but
St. Augustine especially of lay, as distinguished from monastic,
Christianity to the Franks, and finally to us. His rule, expanded into
the treatise of the City of God, is taken for guide of life and policy
by Charlemagne, and becomes certainly the fountain of Evangelical
Christianity, distinctively so called, (and broadly the lay
Christianity of Europe, since, in the purest form of it, that is
to say, the most merciful, charitable, variously applicable, kindly
wise.) The greatest type of it, as far as I know, St. Martin of Tours,
whose character is sketched, I think in the main rightly, in the
Bible of Amiens; and you may bind together your thoughts of its
course by remembering that Alcuin, born at York, dies in the Abbey
of St. Martin, at Tours; that as St. Augustine was in his writings
Charlemagne's Evangelist in faith, Alcuin was, in living presence,
his master in rhetoric, logic, and astronomy, with the other physical
sciences.

A hundred years later than St. Augustine, comes the rule of St.
Benedict--the Monastic rule, virtually, of European Christianity, ever
since--and theologically the Law of Works, as distinguished from the
Law of Faith. St. Augustine and all the disciples of St. Augustine
tell Christians what they should feel a