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THE FAITHFUL MINISTER :

AMBROSE OF MILAN.

In the year of our Lord 374 the Great Church at Milan was the scene of an uproar. It was the election of a bishop in the room of Auxentius, just deceased. In those times such occasions were not rarely disgraced by tumult and even bloodshed. In the course of a keenly contested election, church property, and even the sacred vessels, disappeared as bribes.

Parties ran high at Milan. The last bishop had belonged to the Arian faction, although he had had sufficient subtlety and dissimulation to prevent expulsion from his see. The assembled bishops, at their wits' ends, had entreated the Emperor to nominate a successor, but he had wisely and modestly declined. The town was all but in open riot, and the civil authorities thought it time to interfere. Accordingly, the governor of Liguria and Emilia, of which Milan was the capital-Ambrose by name-entered the church, with the view of quieting the tumultuous assemblage. Silence being restored, a child cried out,

"Ambrose bishop!" Taking this up as a happy idea and a divine omen, the crowd responded with deafening cries, "Let Ambrose be bishop! Let Ambrose be bishop!" and his election was carried by acclamation.

Were the Lord Mayor of London presented with the metropolitan mitre, or the Sheriff of Edinburgh appointed to the pastoral care of one of its vacant churches, he could scarcely be more thoroughly confounded than was Ambrose. The astonishment, however, in his case arose rather from the event being unexpected than from its being unprecedented. The elevation of laymen from secular callings to ecclesiastical honours was not then uncommon, although less usual in the West than in the East. Gregory of Nazianzen makes it the subject of many a satirical remark. In his poem on bishops, he says, "Let no ploughman, joiner, or cobbler-let no one who follows the chase, or beats the anvil-stay away and have another for his bishop, since it is better to rule than to obey. But let one throw away his huge axe, and another quit the plough-tail, another lay aside his leather, another his spear, and another his tongs." He pictures a rabble rout of handicraftsmen and blackguards, jostling, pushing, and knocking down each other as they rush to seize the vacant episcopal chair. The ample revenues and extensive influence attached to the large sees

tempted cupidity and ambition. Many of the bishops dazzled by the splendour of their equipages, the gorgeousness of their apparel, and the princely sumptuousness of their tables. Both by disposition and station, Ambrose was superior to those vulgar attractions which made a bishopric a temptation to many eyes. His father had been prætorian prefect and governor of Gaul, Britain, and Spain. After practising with distinction for some time at the bar, he was made counsellor to Anicius Probus, his father's successor. His next promotion was to the highly honourable and responsible post he now occupied. He had never felt the Church to be his vocation; the sacred office he regarded with awe. To preside over the see of Milan, especially in these critical times, he knew well was a task of infinitely more labour and difficulty than to govern Liguria and Æmilia. He therefore resolutely declined the unsought honour. But the Milanese were equally determined, and their pertinacity drove him to desperate shifts. He got women of the town to frequent his house, in order to sully his reputation for chastity, and brought down the magisterial sword with ostentatious severity on the heads of some unfortunate prisoners who were in his power, to acquire a name for cruelty. Such a device would succeed effectually in modern times. But then white lies and pious frauds were

reckoned quite venial and fair, and the artifice was too clumsy and patent to answer its end. He next tried flight. He stole out of Milan at midnight. Having lost his way, and wandered all · night, he found himself at daybreak close to the town, and was placed under arrest, till the Emperor's pleasure as to relieving him from his civil duties should be known. His hopes in this quarter, if he had any, being dissipated by the arrival of the imperial assent, he fled a second time, and hid himself in a friend's country-house, but returned to Milan in consequence of a threatening edict of the Emperor. The struggle was evidently hopeless, and to the extreme delight of Emperor and people, he at last gave his consent. Thus this strange piece of business terminated.

He was baptized-for he was yet only a catechumen-and with all convenient haste consecrated bishop of Milan. He gave a demonstration of his fitness for the office thrust upon him, and a prognostication of the manner in which he should discharge it, by cutting away at once all secular trammels. He distributed his money among the poor, entrusted the management of his family to Satyrus his brother, and conveyed his landed estates to the Church, reserving the life-rent of them to his sister Marcellina. There was opened up before him a splendid career, but it was one

that demanded the concentrated force of his undivided energies. He hesitated not for a moment, but gave himself at once and wholly to the duties of his new sphere. The result was not only that he kept his ground respectably-which was the utmost his humility allowed him to hope forbut that he carried all before him, and stands at the head of a list of renowned Milanese bishops, the best and holiest of them.

The spectacle we get of the Christian ministry in those dim and troubled years is, on the whole, a noble one. Were we to embody it in a symbol, we should have to paint a figure clad in showy and cumbrous robes, on which the names of superstition and arrogance are seen embroidered; but with one hand holding a broad shield over the oppressed, and with the other dealing bread to the hungry and binding up the wounded heart. The attitude here described was nobly assumed by Ambrose. One instance out of many which might be mentioned to show with what watchful and zealous care he guarded the interests of the weak and defenceless far and near, was his aiding the Bishop of Pavia in resisting demands made in the name of the Emperor on the property of a widow which had been entrusted to the church there. He exhorted his own clergy to consider themselves as the natural guardians of the orphan, the widow, and the prisoner; and animated them

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