bishop Paulinus who was at Thessalonica," have drawn down on him severe censure, as if he had attempted to conceal this recognition by Rome of Meletius's rival. But Valesius defends Theodoret from this obviously improbable charge, and observes that he can only mean that Paulinus was at that time staying in the capital of Macedonia.

The first day of 379 had witnessed the death of the greatest of Eastern bishops. The nineteenth day of that same January was signalised by the association of Theodosius, afterwards not unduly styled the Great, in the full imperial honours, and the committal of Thrace, Asia, and Egypt,—that is, of the whole realm of Valens,to the government of this able Spaniard, whose father, only three years before, had been ignominiously and unrighteously put to death under the authority of the young Emperor, who now, "oppressed and distracted" even with the government of the West, had the wisdom to "select a hero and a statesman" as the successor of his unhappy uncle in the East, as the one man who seemed capable of saving or restoring what had been lost or imperilled by Valens. Gibbon thinks that all history can hardly "afford similar example of an elevation at once so pure and so honourable." Gratian further made over what had been called the diocese of the Mosias, afterwards divided into those of Dacia and Macedonia. This great territory formed the Eastern Illyricum, and included Greece. Illyricum proper-a single "diocese," at first called "of the Pannonias," and containing seven provinces-was retained as part of the Western dominion, and therein of the Italian prefecture. Thereupon Damasus, with true Roman tenacity of power, took steps for retaining a hold over the churches of Eastern Illyricum by appointing Ascholius, bishop of Thessalonica, his deputy for its ecclesiastical affairs. This relation between the two sees lasted for about a century, but it soon became rather nominal than effective: there was, as Duchesne observes, a natural attraction of Greeks and Macedonians to the Eastern capital; and Theodosius II. in 421 enacted that questions arising in Eastern-Illyrian churches should be settled by the synod of the "diocese," but not without the knowledge of the bishop of Constantinople." Theodosius I. was in his thirty-third year when he began that illustrious reign which, although darkened by some grievous shadows, was destined on the whole to lift his name above all others in the Christian imperial line.

CHAPTER XXI.

THE CATHOLIC REVIVAL AT CONSTANTINOPLE.

THE first ecclesiastical event of importance which marked the reign of Theodosius was the revival of Catholic faith and worship at Constantinople. That capital had been in the possession of Arianism for some thirty years, ever since the final expulsion of the orthodox Paul. Heresy had acquired in the minds of many of the citizens a sort of prescriptive right; it was invested with the respectability of a long-established and traditional religion: as Hilary said years before of Eastern Arianism in general," it had so long been taught as the truth that it had come to be taken for the truth;" and it was represented at Constantinople in a moderate and attractive form by a prelate who exhibited great aversion for Eunomian rationalism and "impiety," while at the same time the Eunomians had their own bishop, one Florentius. The Arians, says Gregory, bragged of possessing "theatres and hippodromes, palaces and porticoes, the pillar of Constantine, the surging populace, the senate of high-born men." There was a Catholic minority, "the mere relic of a flock, disorganized, without an overseer," shrunken and enfeebled under the persecution of Valens, and no longer animated by the courage which had been shown in the attempt to establish Evagrius as Catholic prelate of Constantinople after the death of Eudoxius in 370. However, this faithful remnant retained, as Gregory says, a thoroughgoing loyalty to Nicene doctrine, and thus constituted "a little seed of the breath of life" amid the wide-spreading "death" of fashionable heterodoxy. They would look with horror at the Arians who made the great Church of the Eternal Wisdom a stronghold and centre of heresy; at the fanatical Arian women who " outdid men themselves in activity for the cause of misbelief;' at the crowd of irreverent talkers who haunted the public places, and disturbed

even private supper-parties with a flood of incessant flippancies and sarcasms on the most sacred of all subjects: in the language of Gregory of Nyssa, "If you ask the price of a loaf, you are told that the Son is subject to the Father; if you ask whether a bath is ready, the answer is that the Son was made out of nothing." This was in perfect accordance with that intense disputatiousness which (as Athanasius, years before, had testified) led the Arians of Alexandria to question the very boys and women in the streets as to the singleness of the "Ingenerate," or the possibility of an "Eternal Son." The Thalia of Arius, written for the very purpose of popularising his denial of the Son's co-equality, had given the original impulse to this voluble profaneness; and wherever Arianism was dominant, this bad sign of its presence would hardly be wanting.

Could anything now be done for the reorganization of Catholic Christianity in the Eastern capital? This was a question anxiously considered by the leaders of Catholicism even before the death of St. Basil. If we can trust Gregory the presbyter, the biographer of Gregory Nazianzen, Basil had concurred with many other bishops, and with the faithful of Constantinople, in desiring his old friend Gregory Nazianzen to undertake the task. Yet this is improbable, for he had already had experience of the peculiarities which had defeated his plans for Sasima. One great gift Gregory had, and that the bishops expected to prove sufficient-his power as a preacher. He was at this time enjoying that retirement which, throughout his life, possessed for him so irresistible a charm, and which, as he had intimated in his "defence" for returning into Pontus after being ordained priest, was connected in him with a species of mysticism. His father was dead, and he had been living since 375 at Seleucia in Isauria, the city of the Semi-Arian Council of 359. But the call to Constantinople was addressed to him so urgently that he did not feel able to resist it. In his own language, he "went thither, not of his own free will, nor as offering himself to the work, after the fashion of many who were wont to leap eagerly into places of pre-eminence, but in obedience to a summons, or even yielding to pressure, and being guided by religious awe and by the Spirit." Or, as he says in his autobiographical poem, "It was the grace of the Spirit that sent me, by the summons of many pastors and flocks: thus I came, not willingly, but under the influence of men who constrained me;" and he intimates that he was expected to do good service, not only against the Arianism in its various forms, moderate and extreme, which prevailed in

Constantinople, but against the Apollinarian error which nullified the humanity of Christ, and against an opposite tendency to distinguish between the Son of God and the Son of the Virgin, as two persons-the same tendency which, as we have seen, had caused anxiety to Athanasius, and was to constitute the heresy of Nestorianism.

Thus Gregory, "thinking it better to suffer something in the flesh than to sustain injury in the spirit," and praying to have “the rough steep way made smooth for him," obeyed this unwelcome call, and went to Constantinople about the end of 379, fortified by letters of recognition from Peter of Alexandria, who, as he says in his poem, "honoured him with the tokens of establishment in his new dignity"-a phrase which Tillemont does not undertake to explain, but which probably indicated some vague and unwarranted claim of Alexandrian authority over the Church in "New Rome." The enterprise was an extremely bold one for a man of fifty, conspicuously deficient in practical and administrative ability, nervously reluctant to confront the society of a great capital, devoid alike of personal dignity and of colloquial agreeableness, accustomed to rustic seclusion, and, it is said, betraying his antecedents by a rough unpolished dialect. No adventitious resources had he, this poor-looking attenuated recluse with downcast melancholy face, shy and unsocial, penniless and meanly attired, who had come in simple loyalty to duty on this great errand of building up the ruined fabric of orthodoxy at Constantinople. He was welcomed by a niece and her husband to their own house, which was to him, he says, what the Shunammite's was to Elisha; and there the scanty band of Catholics had to assemble-not without peril from the intolerant bitterness of the Arians. This house became famous under the name of "the Anastasia "—the place of the resurrection of the Catholic faith: it stood in what was called the seventh quarter of the city, at some little distance from the western end of the Hippodrome. The congregation was organized, apparently, in April; and forthwith Gregory, as its chief, became a mark for popular denunciation on the part of Arians, who, posing as conservatives in possession, determined to put down the intrusive innovator. "He is denying the one God, and setting up more Gods than one." "They knew no better," was his comment: they had never been taught that the Unity is triune, and the Trinity is one;" or as he says in one of his discourses, in language exactly reproduced in the "Quicunque "-" that the Unity is to

be worshipped (as existing) in a Trinity, and the Trinity (as) in a Unity." One of his first cares was to inculcate a great moral principle which was daily and hourly outraged by the disputatious rationalism of the Ultra-Arians-the principle of reverence in the treatment of Divine truth. Of such reverence, and withal of the single-minded devotion to religious interests which alone could then, or at any time, give real vitality to a religious teacher's work, he himself was a consistent and conspicuous example. "One must purify oneself," said he in one of his earlier sermons delivered in the Anastasia, "before one holds converse with Him who is pure." "I wish it may befall me neither to think nor to speak, concerning God, anything that is my own." "Ascend by holiness of life, if thou desirest to become a theologian; keep the commandments, for action is the step to contemplation: even Paul confessed that he could only see through a mirror and dimly." When he spoke of the great doctrine which he had come to preach -the mystery of the Trinity-he had to guard against the Sabellian "confusion" and the Arian "severance," against that false kind of Monotheism which would make the Trinity "merely nominal," and that "Judaizing" error which would confine Deity to the Unbegotten Father, or that other which would constitute three independent principles or three separate Gods: it was necessary to secure what of old was called the "Monarchia" by referring the Son and the Spirit to the Father as causative Principle; and at the same time to exclude any confusion of the three "hypostases or " persons," and to insist on the reality of the Unity as existing in Trinity-of the "one glory in three brightnesses." But he was also most earnest in protesting against any attempts to measure the divine Sonship by earthly standards, to rationalise as to the "procession" of the Spirit-in short, to ask unbefittingly "How?" And whatever he said to his people on this fundamental mystery was pervaded and illuminated not only by the reverent caution which discouraged all attempts to comprehend the Infinite, to grasp the supreme essence in a formula, but by the adoring devotion of one whose spirit lived on the truths which he was defending, and by the profound conviction of their practical bearing upon life. The habit of his mind and the tone of his teaching on these points may be gathered from some vivid passages in his twenty-third sermon, particularly devoted as it was to the question of peace between different parties of Catholics, and written, in fact, after the "concordat" between the adherents of Paulinus and