conservative and unchanging. It partakes of the immobility of the East. It has stood by itself, not only struggling with Mahometanism, but in antagonism with the Western Church, maintaining its traditional orthodoxy, and taking no strength from communication with the rest of the world. Its isolation has kept it stationary. From the beginning it was a creature of the State, of a despotic government, and never learned to exert itself for its own support. It was never a free, self-acting church. It has never been a missionary church. It has had no Hildebrand, no Luther, no Loyola, no Council of Trent. Its worship is antique and unæsthetic, a strange combination of "barbaric rudeness and elaborate ceremonialism." No Sistine Madonna, no Descent from the Cross, no Martyrdom of St. Peter, shines over any of its altars. Its monks have been only monks, not learned like the Benedictines, not missionary and preaching like the Mendicants, but simple recluses from the world. Monasticism became active and practical in the West, but has remained contemplative and eremite in the East. The West never had a Simeon Stylites. The pillar saint is a birth of the East. The monastic system of the Eastern Church has hardly altered since the time of St. Basil. Unlike the Latin Church, the Greek Church has a married clergy, and gives far more independence and consequence to the laity. It has no infallible Pope. It allows the Scriptures in the vulgar tongue, and in general it has not been a persecuting Church,1 close as it clings to its ancient creeds, and stiffly as it avows its exclusive orthodoxy. The fortunes of the Eastern Church are no longer bound up with the destiny of Constantinople. The Papacy has no historic or logical home but Rome, and it is doubtful if it could retain its vitality, perhaps even its existence, if expatriated, whatever the fate of the Roman Church. But the nationalism, what we may call the Gallicanism, of the Stanley, Eastern Church, 122.

Eastern Churches, has made them independent of person or of place, of a hereditary patriarch or capital. The city of the Sultan will pass into the hands of some Christian power, Russian, Austrian, Greek, Sclavonic, or become a free city, an emporium of the world's commerce, with no political allegiance, but its authority as one of the two great capitals of the Christian world is not likely to be restored.

The dome of St. Sophia may once more cover a Christian worship, the Turk may recross the Bosphorus never to return, but the Constantinople of the past, of eleven centuries of Christian history, unless by some strange revolution in the historic order, will not come back. Whatever its future, brighten it as we may with all Christian hopes, it is the old, the vanished, the buried Constantinople, with its finished mission, with its mingled splendor and shame, with its spiritual power transferred to new centres, a monument like Jerusalem and Alexandria, and only that, which we can place among the capital cities of the Christian faith.

HISTORICAL ESSAYS.

SAINT AMBROSE AND HIS TIME.1

It is the history hanging over the Italian cities which gives many of them their peculiar attraction to the traveler. They are sought for the sake of what has been, and imagination recreates in them the Past, which may have left few tangible relics, but which, nevertheless, overshadows all present glory. They are filled with a population of shadows and memories, of great figures and stately names, of emperors and prelates, of writers and warriors, emerging from the dim history in which they have been living, and bringing with them something of the life of the ancient time. In Ravenna, the Roman Cæsar, the Gothic King, the Greek Exarch, kept their state; there begun, in the gift of Pepin and Charlemagne, the power of the Pope as a temporal prince, which has expired under our own eyes; and there is the mausoleum of the daughter of the great Theodosius, and the tomb of Dante, sleeping far from his ungrateful Florence. The shrunk and desolate Ferrara once had the most splendid court in Europe; there is the house of Ariosto, and the prison of Tasso; it was the retreat of Calvin, and the birthplace of Olympia Morata. Wandering into Milan, in the end of the last summer, drawn and enchanted by its great cathedral, I found rising before me constantly the stately figure of her great bishop and saint, whose presence, memory, and name 1 Published in the Baptist Quarterly, vol. vii.

Sancti Ambrosii Mediolanensis Episcopi Opera, ad manuscriptos codices Vaticanos, Gallicanos, Belgicos, etc., nec-non ad editiones veteres emendata, studio et labore monachorum Ordinis S. Benedicti, e Congregatione S. Mauri. Tomus Primus, Parisiis: MDCLXXXVI.; Tomus Secundus, MDCXC.