rebellion. This counsel conspired with the strain of ferocity under provocation which marred the Emperor's nobleness, and also with his indolent reliance on trusted advisers, to defeat his "second thoughts;" and orders were issued for a general slaughter of the Thessalonian people, which Rufinus, of course, would describe as the execution of a community responsible, as such, for the murder of an imperial officer. Such deeds, as we have seen, would not have shocked the conscience of primitive times; but how, one asks, could a Christian prince think them lawful? Cæsarism, by concentrating all judicial power in the Cæsar, made them possible; and the possibility might arouse "the wild beast in the man," as it did oftener, though to less tragical effect, in Valentinian I. We are told that Theodosius again returned to a better mind, and sent off a mandate, which came too late, recalling his sanguinary order. An indiscriminate massacre continued for three hours, and seven thousand persons perished without the slightest form of trial, including several strangers who had recently come up for commercial reasons to the great Macedonian capital, which now, in Sozomen's expression, was "deluged with innocent blood." By one account the people were attacked while assembled in the circus; but this detail may have been due to the agents employed, rather than to any imperial instructions. When the dreadful news reached Milan, Theodosius was absent; but he was soon to return, and Ambrose, taking advantage of an illness which, though real, would not in other circumstances have kept him out of his sovereign's presence, retired into the country, chiefly in order to give Theodosius time to reflect. He wrote with his own hand a letter of earnest remonstrance. After referring at the outset to the Emperor's long-standing friendliness, he dwelt on the fact that Theodosius had often been annoyed by his having heard of resolutions taken in the Consistory. But what he had heard, he could not help hearing: and could he now be silent? Quoting Ezekiel's words as to the duty of "warning" a sinner, he adverted to the fiery temper which was the besetting fault of the monarch, although he could often exhibit a generous clemency; he spoke of the "unparalleled deed" which had been done at Thessalonica, and of which the prelates then met in Milan had heard "with groans, not one of them viewing it indulgently;" and urged the Emperor to imitate the contrition which David showed on the two occasions on which he had been rebuked. "If you choose to attend the service, I dare not offer the sacrifice :" nor could Theodosius expect

to have any offering of his accepted. It was the part of a true Christian not to excuse, but to condemn, his own sin. He concluded with expressions of loyal and cordial regard.

Theodosius found this letter awaiting him on his return to Milan; at first he treated it with a strange indifference, and, relying on his imperial position, was coming to church as if nothing had happened. Ambrose, who had also returned, confronted him in the "atrium" outside the church-the entrance court now represented for visitors to Sant' Ambrogio by a spacious and stately enclosure attributed to a ninth-century archbishop-and, as Paulinus puts it briefly, "refused him permission to enter:" Sozomen adds that he publicly took hold of the Emperor's purple robe. Whatever might be the Emperor's surprise, his frank and noble nature mastered irritation, and although we can hardly suppose that he pleaded that David, after all, had done worse than he (indeed, it is highly probable that Paulinus made a confusion between the bishop's own reference to David's case and words spoken on this occasion by the Emperor), he submitted to the official announcement that he must do penance for a definite period. Eight months passed away, and Christmas came to gladden the faithful of Milan with the hymn in which their bishop invoked the "Redeemer of the nations, the Virgin-born, the Incarnate God, from whose manger-cradle beamed forth, to the eyes of faith, the ever-fresh brightness of a day that knew no close." The churches were crowded as usual with worshippers of every class. But one Christian and Churchman remained within his apartments as if not venturing to welcome the great Birthday. It was believed in the next century that Theodosius, who had laid aside, during those sad months, the imperial ornaments, was found by his evil counsellor Rufinus sitting alone and bathed in tears. The Greek historian's narrative is too rhetorical to be trustworthy in detail. Words are put into the Emperor's mouth which Theodoret considered proper for such exceptional circumstances; he is said to have accepted Rufinus's proposal to intercede with Ambrose-a proposal naturally ineffectualand then, on receiving a discouraging message from the bishop while he was passing through the forum on his way to the basilica, to have obtained admission to the episcopal guest-chamber adjoining the church. There Ambrose, we are told, consented to readmit him to Church fellowship if he would do his best to prevent such consequences of imperial wrath by enacting that, in every case, an interval of thirty days should elapse between a capital sentence and

its execution. The Emperor then found himself free to enter the church. But his profound contrition was expressed by his humble demeanour; he did not stand, nor even kneel, but, in the attitude of the third class of the penitents, prostrated himself on the pavement, repeating, we are told, the words, "My soul cleaveth to the dust!" smiting his forehead and tearing his hair, and watering the ground with his tears. To this scene Ambrose alludes when he says that Theodosius, "having stripped off his insignia," publicly, in the church, wept for his sin, into which he had been betrayed by the deceitful influence of others. With groans and tears he entreated pardon, nor was there a day of his after life on which he did not bewail that error."

Such was the memorable triumph, "the culminating point," as Milman calls it," of pure Christian influence," when "Christianity appeared before the world as the champion and vindicator of outraged humanity." Theodosius, at this Christmas festival of 390, endured the "shame that is glory and grace," and called out, as Augustine tells us, the sympathy and admiration of his people by a humiliation which was, in truth, the ennobling of Christian monarchy, because it was not the mere assertion of ecclesiastical power over civil within the sphere of Church life (although it might afterwards be perverted into a precedent for ecclesiastical encroachments), but the recognition by the civil power, on genuinely Christian and moral grounds, of its subjection to an authority which knew no respect of persons, when enforcing as a condition of Christian privileges the necessity of repentance for a crime against humanity and against God.

CHAPTER XXVI.

THE LAST YEARS OF THEODOSIUS.

THE state of the Eastern Church, at the time of the Penance of Theodosius, was not very satisfactory. For several years, in spite of the Councils of Constantinople, her different branches had been suffering, partly from the spread of heresy, partly from faction and division. Gregory Nazianzen had just died, after undergoing, since his retirement from Constantinople, a series of anxieties and distresses under which, at one time, his faith in the providential government of the Church well-nigh gave way. "It seems," he wrote to Nectarius, as if the care of God, which in our fathers' times had always watched over the Churches, had now entirely abandoned the present life. My soul is so immersed in a depth of calamities, that I hardly reckon my own personal troubles -intolerable as they would otherwise seem-among evils, and look only at the general affliction of the Church." He describes the Arians-that is, those who were called Eudoxians-as audaciously assuming a right to organize Churches. The Macedonians boasted of having bishops ordained by their chief Eleusius. The Apollinarians, however, constituted, in his opinion, the most painful of all the Church's trials. They claimed the same liberty to assemble as that which belonged to Churchmen. Gregory had seen a book by Apollinaris, which exceeded every other specimen of heresy; it distinctly affirmed that the Lord Jesus, "the Second Man from Heaven," had brought His flesh with Him from above, and that He, the "Only-begotten God," the Lifegiver, the destroyer of death, had suffered death in His Divinity. Toleration of such teaching appeared to Gregory a virtual "condemnation of the doctrine of the Church."

Apollinaris himself died, probably before the year 390, at a very advanced age, retaining his heresy to the last, and leaving

behind him a multitude of writings, in verse as well as in prose. His followers were proud to bear his name, or that of his disciple, bishop Vitalis; but they were divided into two parties— the more extreme represented by Polemon and Timotheus, who maintained that the Divinity and the flesh of Christ were "consubstantiated" or formed into one nature; and the more moderate, led by Valentinus, who declared this notion to be alike untenable and impious. Among the sects which were most directly opposed to the Apollinarian, the Eudoxians kept up their episcopal succession by placing Marinus in the seat of Demophilus, and then superseding him by Dorotheus, whom they summoned from Antioch. Hence arose a schism and a controversy. Dorotheus maintained (logically from the Arian standpoint) that "God was not Father before the "generation" of the Son, while Marinus and his adherents -who were nicknamed Psathyrians or "Cakemen," because one of their leaders was a cake-seller-held that He was "Father" even while the Son existed not; and Selenas, or Selinus, the successor of Ulfilas, a man of "bilingual" ability, professed this opinion. Moreover, in the little Psathyrian sect a quarrel arose between Marinus and Agapius, whom Marinus had ordained as bishop for Ephesus. The feud between the Psathyrians and the rest of the Eudoxians lasted thirty-five years. Of the Anomoans, also, a similar story has to be told: Eunomius had died at his native village in Cappadocia; and his disciple Theophronius, who, like him, was a keen dialectician and Aristotelian, and had written a book "On Training of the Mind," was cast off by the other Eunomians for asserting that the divine knowledge was of a different kind in regard to past, present, and future. Eutychius, another Eunomian, declared that the Son had received from the Father full knowledge of the time of the Last Judgment; he too, before Eunomius's death, had been driven out of the communion of the Eunomian bishops; but it is remarkable that his view was sanctioned by Eunomius, who admitted Eutychius to prayers, although he did not come fortified by letters of commendation. The Macedonians were distracted between the partisans of Carterius aud Eutropius. The contagion, so to speak, of dissension reached even the tranquil Novatians, among whom Quartodecimanism had revived in the reign of Valens, and was again advocated by a Jewish convert named Sabbatius, who had been admitted to priest's orders; but the Novatian bishops, assembled in Council at a Bithynian town named Angarum or Sangarum, passed a canon which "left the