duty to enshrine them among our Lares and Penates, and honour them for whatever goodness, nobleness, or power they displayed. It is natural for us to wish to view them from our own standpoint; and to be curious to see how they look, when transferred from the dim religious light of stained cathedral windows and sepulchral cloisters, to the light by which we think, and work, and scrutinise other men, living or dead.

Their difference from the moderns is sufficient of itself to make them objects of interest. Of the genus bishop, for example, there are in the present day many species extant; as also of martyrs, preachers, and saints. Yet what ecclesiastical naturalist will have the hardihood to identify any of them with those of the first centuries of Christianity? While they generically resemble, there is a specific difference between them as strongly marked at least as that between the nautilus of the present age and the extinct ammonite. It is certain, notwithstanding, that the peculiarities of the Fathers have often been exaggerated. In the attempt to make them the objects of superstitious admiration and reverence, they have been placed beyond the range of our sympathies by the suppression of all that in them seemed to savour of human weakness, and by plentiful additions of marvel and myth. Hence, upon the whole, the modern age has been about as little moved by the

recital of their virtues and miracles, as were Longfellow's jovial monks, when draining their wassail bowl, by the voice of the Reader, as he

"Droned from the pulpit, like the murmur of golden bees, The legend of good St. Guthlac and St. Basil's homilies."

It must, however, be the fault of the biographer, if he fails altogether to invest with interest a sketch of the most eminent of ecclesiastical disciplinarians, the greatest Christian philanthropist of his time, its most eloquent orator and glorious martyr, the man who, though bishop of an African see, was virtually head of the Western Church, and who by Tractarian, now Popish Newman, and Evangelical Joseph Milner, is held up as a model bishop, the most perfect incarnation of the episcopal ideal, and by others as a headstrong and overbearing ecclesiastical despot.

All this Thascius Cæcilius Cyprianus, Bishop of Carthage, is said to have been; and without great talents and force of character he never could have earned such a reputation. The contradictory opinions formed of him may be accounted for partly by the spite, humorous or malignant, at reverend and ecclesiastical personages, which delights in hustling and nudging them, as Prince Kaunitz did the Pope when showing his holiness the pictures at Vienna; partly by the severe justice which has the same rule and measure for

saints and statesmen, bishops and generals; partly by the blind veneration which some have for churchmen and canonized martyrs, rather than by the paucity of materials for forming our judgment. For these, though scanty, are valuable, and not only sufficient to furnish hints to enable an active imagination to construct a representation of the good bishop similar to those corporeal restorations of the saints, in which all that is genuine is a rib, or a tooth, or a few hairs, the rest being of wax, but sufficient to enable one who aims at working after the manner of the scientific palæontologist,--who, by the help of a few fossil bones, can tell the structure and habits of the living animal, to say with tolerable accuracy what manner of man Cyprian was, and to give to the age in which he lived its form and pressure.

His literary remains, consisting of fourteen treatises, and eighty-one epistles, with a short memoir from the pen of Pontius, his deacon or personal attendant, are our chief sources of information.

In the first half of the third century there lived at Carthage a celebrated teacher of rhetoric. His profession brought him honour and emolument, and, if tradition may be credited, political, or at least civic influence. This was the future bishop, the subject of our present sketch.

It is difficult in any age for one whose occupation is either to teach or study classical literature,

to be anything but a heathen, as can be verified by the experience of the days in which we thumbed our Virgils and Homers, when Jupiter and Apollo were to us almost as real as Paul and Peter. Christianity, though uncrushed by oppression and martyrdom, was not yet in the ascendant; it had in this century to endure some of the fiercest persecutions to which it had ever been subjected; and Cyprian, till he was forty-five years of age, was a worshipper of the gods of his ancestors. Little is recorded of the heathen period of his life. But it appears he was gay and somewhat dissolute.

Pontius, his deacon or confidential beadle, with whom, in defiance of the adage that no man is a hero in the eyes of his valet, Cyprian is the greatest of bishops and most glorious of martyrs, passes by this period entirely, with the remark, that a man's actions should be recorded, not from the time of his first, but of his second birth. He gives us no assistance in tracing the steps that led to his master's conversion. This event, in his short memoir, is represented not only as supernatural, but miraculous in its suddenness as well as completeness; and Cyprian's career as a Christian, as there related, is not the rise and gradual culmination of a star, but the transit of a meteor in a line of supernatural light, with no waxing or waning, but springing from the darkness at once in full splendour, and vanishing as suddenly as it came.

"In him," says the deacon, with more than Boswellian admiration, "all things incredible meet together; in him the threshing anticipated the sowing; the vintage, the tendril; the fruit, the firm root."

Making, however, all allowances for the colouring of the marvellous thrown around it by Pontius, Cyprian's transformation from a heathen to a Christian strikes us by its thoroughness; and while the discovery of the invisible links between the first forty-five and the last twelve years of his life would make Cyprian more interesting as a psychological study, it would not, in our decided opinion, take his conversion out of the category of events supernatural and divine. The suddenness of such conversions as Cyprian's, we believe for the most part to be only apparent. Those mighty upheavals which by divine influence shatter old habits, prejudices, and opinions, are generally the result of forces that have been silently generating and operating for long periods, just as waters accumulate gradually in subterranean reservoirs, until at last the upward pressure overcomes the resistance of the superincumbent mass, and the ground is rent and covered with ruins. It is evident, from a passage in his treatise on "The Grace of God," that he had speculated on conversion long before he became a Christian; and that, when sunk in fashionable pleasures and vices, he had begun