Ambrose was one of the men who, by Providential position as well as by powerful character, had an important part in moulding the Latin Church and Latin Christianity, which have so greatly shaped the fortunes and colored the history of the modern world. At a juncture when the new religion was fixing its form, and organizing itself for the conquest of Western Europe; when, as we cannot but think, it was violating its first principles, and abdicating its noblest opportunity for the sake of temporal as well as spiritual dominion, and cherishing the ambition of advancing both together; when it was condensing itself into a gigantic ecclesiasticism: this Roman civilian, trained in all civic duties and virtues, used to command, with the clear head, the resolute will, the austere virtue which belong to the typical Roman, came to the See where, next to that of the metropolis of the world, he could direct the course of Western Christianity. He took the theocratic view, which is the farthest possible from ours. He held it, no doubt, sincerely; not out of personal ambition, not so much, perhaps, from mere narrow sacerdotalism as from a profound conviction that religion, and the Church which he identified with it, was real king of the world. But in it was the germ of that dark growth of ecclesiastical power which has shed disastrous eclipse across the ages since. It without doubt has done service for mankind. It protected the weak against worse enemies. It carried the ark of God, the culture, the learning, the piety, the seeds of a better time, through ages of barbarism and darkness. It has often balanced and counterpoised, it has resisted and sometimes avenged, the tyrannies of civil power. But another age has come, and the world henceforth refuses to shelter itself under the protection or to bear the yoke of ecclesiastical power. That power wanes, and religion finds for itself a surer and a purer home in the heart of man, and baptism at Milan, according to the Ambrosian ritual in the twelfth century. History of Baptism, 95–102.

in his voluntary submission to Divine law. History has shown that it is not safe to trust man with great power in the Church, and it is not needful. Religion is suppressed, asphyxiated, killed, under excess of organization. It lives, it grows, at all events it preserves its spiritual freshness and purity, in the air of liberty, and through the processes of spontaneous development. The aspiration and the destiny of Italy of the Italy of Ambrose and Cavour, of Theodosius and Victor Emanuel is for a free Church in a free state; for religion at last to come to that happy position where the fathers of Rhode Island left it at the beginning of their history, -the Church, religion, to stand or fall by its own truth, virtue, spiritual power, and inward life, keeping itself out of civil government, keeping the government out of it.

BENEDICT AND THE BENEDICTINES.1

HALF-WAY between Rome and Naples there rises above the town of San Germano a mountain crag overlooking the valley of the Liris,

"The river taciturn of classic

crowned with the white walls and gleaming windows of a building which, at first sight, the traveler might mistake for a palace or a castle. It is Monte Casino, the cradle of Western monasticism, the capital of the Benedictines for over thirteen hundred years, - the most ancient and most illustrious monastery in Christendom. At its base are the ruins of a city going back to the dim times of the Volsci, with an amphitheatre of the days of the Cæsars, and the villa of Varro, who in learning and piety was a Pagan Benedictine of the best type. From its top opens a prospect of Italian beauty, with the river creeping across the hazy plain, the valleys scarped in soft lines in the northern and eastern hills, with the snow covered Apennines shining in the remoter horizon. Not far are Arpino, where Marius and Cicero were born, and Aquino, the birthplace of Juvenal and Thomas Aquinas. Here, remote from cities and traveled resorts, on its isolated hill, is the home of a society whose antiquity, whose history, whose members, 1 Published in the Baptist Quarterly, vol. x.

Les Monastères Bénédictins d'Italie; Souvenirs d'un voyage littéraire au dela des Alpes; par Alphonse Dantier. Ouvrage couronné par l'Academie Française. Deuxième édition. Paris Didier &

Cie. 1867.

2 "Non rura quæ Liris quietâ

Mordet aquâ, taciturnus amnis." Horace, Ode I. 31.

whose wealth, learning, and literary treasures, and whose numerous progeny, give it a singular eminence. Its church surpasses every other in Italy, even St. Peter's itself, in elegant and costly decoration. Its library was the ark in which some of the richest treasures of ancient literature survived the dark ages. Its archives, with eight hundred original documents, furnish abundant material for ecclesiastical diplomatics and archæology. And it was here, nearly five hundred years after Christianity had come into Italy, and two centuries after it had been legalized by Constantine, more than a hundred years after Honorius had decreed the extinction of Paganism and the destruction of its temples, and after Theodoric the Goth had interdicted its exercise in Italy under penalty of death, —it was here, on this little mountain in Campania, that the ancient religion found its last refuge, as if the better to survey the vast domain which the new faith had taken from it, and to breathe its expiring sigh over the loss. While everywhere else in Italy the old idolatry had disappeared, here, on this lofty height, so near the metropolis of Christendom, early in the sixth century, there was an ancient Temple of Apollo still undestroyed, and a grove where the peasantry still made sacrifices to gods and demons.

It was to this spot, it was perhaps in order to attack and vanquish this abomination, that Benedict fled from the retreat he had tried to find in the gorges of Subiaco. There, among the wild and picturesque Sabine Hills, ascending the course of the Ani as it hollows its path from fall to fall among the rocks, he had thirty-five years before taken refuge as he made his escape from the world whose attractions he dreaded. The son of a noble house of the town of Nursia, born in the year 480, and spending his boyhood in study at Rome, he had taken early disgust at the profligate manners of his companions, and before he was fifteen, if we may credit his biographer, Gregory the

Great, he had resolved to renounce all prizes of the world, and try the discipline of solitude and penance. For three years he buried himself in a cave among the cliffs of Subiaco, indebted for his hair-cloth shirt and dress of skins, and scanty fare, to a monk from a convent near by, who alone knew his place of concealment; and there he led the outward life of a wild beast, and, as he conceived, the inward life of an angel. He suffered inward torments and outward vexations. The legend goes that he conquered his unchaste thoughts by rolling his naked body in a bush of thorns till the blood came. The monks of Vicovaro importuned him to take the rule of their house, and then, weary of his austerity, tried to poison him in the wine of the Eucharist. He returned to his cavern, where he could find better company in himself. Habitavit secum, says Gregory. But the fame of his sanctity had drawn a multitude of monks around Subiaco, who are soon gathered into a community, and Benedict is their superior. It had also exposed him to trials, and brought him enemies, the usual penalty of any kind of excellence. His good name and even his life is assailed; lewd women are introduced into his monasteries; his efforts to maintain strict discipline are thwarted, and he resolves to abandon the spot sacred to him by so many years of conflict. He is nearly fifty years old; but he perhaps cherishes in his soul the hope of better success in a new experiment. He carries in his bosom, it may be, the germs of the reform he is to start, of that institute he is to establish, and moves in the consciousness of a great purpose and a great destiny towards a new retreat among the hills of Campania. It is not unlikely that report had come to him of the lingering Paganism of the place, and that he went as a missionary to drive idolatry from a haunt where the negligence of the Church and the ignorance of the people had allowed it to remain so long.1 M. Dantier adds the 1 Beugnot, Destruction du Paganisme, ii. 287.