insignificant suburb. On the breast of hills sloping down to the stream, and in the intermediate plain, lay widely spread the beautiful city, which boasted in the fourth century of being only third to Rome and Constantinople. Three leagues in circuit, with a population of a quarter of a million, it must have been somewhat larger than modern Dublin, while in the picturesqueness of its site, the rifted ravines that scarred the surface of its hills, and the dark mountain torrents that divided its streets, it must have far surpassed in its local attractions the elegant capital of the sister island. Thus the city which Seleucus built, and the Syrian kings made the stronghold of their power and the metropolis of their splendour, was even more signalized by the endowments of nature than adorned by the contrivances of art. Yet these latter were not wanting. Macedonians, Syrians, and Romans, for hundreds of years, lavished their resources upon its embellishment with no inadequate success; and temple and shrine, academy and portico, theatre and eircus, palace and basilica, rose in all quarters, the growth of luxury, the ministers of pride, to attest the wealth and skill of the contrivers. Of the excellence of their architecture, proof remains to this day in the massive portions of the huge encircling walls and towers of cut stone, which have defied the efforts of time and incessant warfare for two thousand years to demolish, to which we must add the shocks of repeated earthquakes, which, while they have shattered all less substantial works to ruin, have been forced to spare these enormous ramparts. Power had its home here, for it was the capital of a monarchy; commerce its mart, for it was the highway along which passed the merchandise of the East and West; science its schools, for philosophers follow rank and cultivation; and luxury its hot-bed, where the corruptions of Europe and Asia met, and from their conjunction sprung a prodigal outgrowth of vice and debauchery, such as neither of them singly had been able to produce. The virtues as well as the vices of civilization were there, but the vices predominated from the character of the soil whence they issued.

The glory of the city within the walls was outshone by the Switzerland of varied beauty without. Let us take our stand on that western hill, which kingly jealousy has fortified with especial care as the citadel of the place, and the dernier ressort of its defenders. With that gallant centurion's leave, who commands the gates to-day, we shall mount the topmost tower, and take in at a glance the panorama of splendour around. Not far distant to the south rises Mount Casius in solitary grandeur, a perfect cone; more south and east, the northern term of the range; due east, along the upward course of the Orontes, the

lake backed by mountains in the far distance and in front, while directly under the walls, stretches that extensive plain up and down the river which, though less picturesque than the bolder scenery around, like the Vega of Granada, has a beauty of its own in its rich gardens, vineyards and oliveyards, flowers and fruit.

Fringed with an arboreal vegetation of the most varied and luxuriant sort, the Orontes takes its way westward to the sea, in as lordly state as the Jordan with its palmy swellings to its bed in the Asphaltic gulf. During this brief transit, its majestic bluffs of 300 feet high may compare to no disadvantage with "the castled crag of Drachenfels," or the Bastei of Saxon Schweitz. Often and often, when Antioch was the metropolis of an empire, and not as now the echo of a name, must those bluffs have rung with the music of the royal galley, as one after another Antiochus sought relief from the ennui of pleasure on shore, by courting it on the stream,-to pall anywhere, for of all earth's vanities, pleasure is the most evanescent. Now, however, tracing the course of the river by occasional gleams of its waters, but chiefly by its bordering myrtles, the eye of the observer at last rests upon that object which alone compensates for lack of beauty in a landscape, which is in itself, in all moods, scenery to the most fastidious eye,-the glorious sea, and that sea of all seas the ancientest and best known-the blue Mediterranean, about as distant from Antioch as Ostia from Rome.

But is there no intermediate object to detain the eye? Whither tends that merry-making mob, with so much of the gaiety of holiday, and somewhat of the pomp of procession? What mean those banners and canopies, those cymbals and trumpets, festal robes, and incense, and song? These are bound for Daphne, that grove in the distance, where the rose and laurel vie for pre-eminence,-the rose by its flowers and fragance compensating for the brevity of its life, the laurel by the perpetuity of its verdure making amends for its lack of flowers. And other embowering trees and shrubs are there, fair to look upon and sweet to smell, while most luxuriant to shelter the fainting frame from the heat of day, and to hide questionable license from the prying eye of curiosity. A coarse and licentions worship holds its revel there to-day; but every day in the glades and recesses of that greenwood is in this respect nearly alike. The votaries of Venus and Adonis have their home amid those voluptuous shades, tempt all comers with soft delights, and blend the monstrous materialism of the Orient, and the scarcely more refined imaginations of Greece, into an unending liturgy of sensuality and sin. The scene we describe might have been witnessed any day down to the date of Chrysostom, for our

chronicler is Cyril of Alexandria, who could not have written sooner than A.D. 412. Of the extent and magnificence of the city in the Middle Ages, when the alternate conquest of Saracen and Crusader, a fair idea may be formed from the information supplied by the Gesta Francorum, that it contained 360 convents for men and women, besides a due proportion of churches, while its patriarch had 150 bishops within his jurisdiction. A grand, picturesque, and potential city was Antioch, both pagan and Christian, until the last thousand years. As the Crescent grew, Antioch waned-the history without an exception of the entire East, once so populous and flourishing, a damning judgment of the social incapacity of Mohammedanism. Its streets are now silent which were full of people, its temples demolished, its marts forsaken, its inhabitants poor and few, cooped up in a corner of what was once the queen-city of Syria, and of all that was little remains but the beauty of nature to testify what once it had been.

There, in the most thriving days of its prosperity, and in the most degenerate of its moral character, did Chrysostom labour year after year, "a workman" that needed not "to be ashamed," -we speak of the conscientiousness of his labours, not of the clearness of his views,-according to his light dividing "the word of truth."

JOHN, surnamed CHRYSOSTOM, was the son of a gentleman, his father having been an officer of rank in the Roman army in Syria. Secundus, when commandant of the cavalry in that region, had married a young and accomplished wife, Anthusa, in Antioch, her parentage like his own, being Greek or Roman. What is more important is to be able to state that the parents were Christian soldiers in the army of the Cross, enlisted in the sacramental host of heaven. Although the dates assigned to the birth of Chrysostom range between A.D. 344 and 354, we are disposed, with the most trustworthy writers, to adopt the year 354, as nearest the truth. While yet an infant in arms, his gallant father died, leaving his widowed mother burdened with the care of him and of his sister, little older than himself. Means of support were fortunately not wanting, for without trenching upon the property of his father to which Chrysostom was heir, his mother supported in fitting style her orphan children on her patrimonial estate; nevertheless, all the cares of widowed maternity were hers.

The orphans were fortunate in their mother, singularly so, yet who has heard of Anthusa, the guardian of her son's morals, the steward of his estate, the "widow indeed" of the gallant Secundus, the Christian parent of Chrysostom? The world has 'rung with the praises of Monica, the mother of

Augustine, yet amongst the mothers of the great and good must we not omit the virtuous and prudent trainer of one of the greatest orators in the world. The reason is to be found in some two or three considerations. The fame of Chrysostom himself is over-shadowed-at least has been so up to a recent date-by the denser, loftier laurels of Augustine. Chrysostom was a great preacher, but Augustine an eminent theologian; the one a brilliant speaker, the other a weighty writer; Chrysostom would, therefore, be admired as an expositor, while Augustine would be appealed to as an authority. The church of the West, moreover, has been exclusively dominant over Europe for fifteen hundred years, and Africa had the closest connexion with the Western church, bound up with its fortunes, professing its creed, acknowledging its influence, and more or less owning its control. The prominent post, therefore, assigned to his mother in the story of his conversion by the great African divine, would naturally spread her name through those regions where his writings were popular, and render her, in the common imagination, the type of all that is hallowed, superior, and successful in the training of perverse youth. The very faults of the man, the confession of which has made him an object of such enchaining interest among all persons who have heard his name, have likewise contributed to the celebrity of that saintly woman, who, aided by the grace of God, successfully combated those faults, and made him what he afterwards became. The Eastern Patriarch, who wrote in Greek, was never so wellknown in the Latin churches-nor consequently his mother; and, known by misfortune, he never could become so interesting as a man known by his faults. A pauper is common-place in comparison with a criminal; in popular appreciation the usurper is ever the hero, not the degraded monarch. The comparative blamelessness of Chrysostom's life at all periods militated against his obtaining so wide-spread a reputation as Augustine, whose splendid sins were in harmony with his otherwise splendid career. Be these modes of accounting for the fact true or false, the fact itself is undeniable that Chrysostom's mother's name strikes with an alien sound on most ears, while Monica is as familiar as Lois and Eunice in almost every Christian household. Yet was Anthusa a matron possessed of every Christian virtue, a vessel of election, and filled with the grace of God. Without that gaudy splendour which bespeaks vanity but ministers in no degree to comfort, she supplied her son with an equipage befitting his birth and station, gave him the best education the city could supply, and allowed nothing to be wanting which could develope his talents, and fulfil her trust. So well, on the

other hand, did the son profit by the instructions of the rhetorician Libanius, a pagan philosopher of great repute, that when the question of a successor to occupy his chair was mooted, Libanius is reported to have said of his pupil, "Chrysostom would have been the man if the Christians had not got hold of him." It was by a refinement in cruelty on the part of the apostate Julian, that the Christians had been debarred at this time from supplying the higher order of instruction in Christian schools. The policy of that emperor was a crafty and base one, and succeeded no doubt, in some instances, in corrupting and apostatizing the educated youth of the Christian families. Chrysostom himself was not beyond the reach of unfriendly influence, and might have fallen into utter worldliness, open vice, or confessed paganism, but for a salutary association with some pious Christian youth, Theodore afterwards Bishop of Mopsuestia, Maximian of Seleucia, and above all Basil of Raphanea, whose friendship helped to fan the flame of his Christian convictions. On his being called to the bar, however, when about twenty years of age, and mixing somewhat more directly with the world and its distractions, his heathen education interposed but an imperfect check between his temptations and his weakness. The business of his calling and the pleasures of the theatre led him into a temporary forgetfulness of the counsels of his friends and the pious training of his mother. But in a very short time he recovered himself. Basil regained his influence, and with the natural impulse to get as far from his fallen self as possible, Chrysostom assumed the garb and profession of an anchorite. This led, after four years of seclusion, study, and discipline, to his solemn reception of the rite of Christian baptism at the hands of Meletius, Bishop of Antioch, and his induction into the Order of Lectors. Conscientious in a high degree, and devoted to that sacred calling on which, in its lowest grades, he had entered, we find him now contriving to slip the sacerdotal noose over the neck of his friend Basil, by a device which we scarcely know how to characterize. Scattered as the officiating clergy of Antioch were from their flocks by the persecution of Valens, the neighbouring bishops determined to replace them by the ordination of Basil and Chrysostom in their stead. But Chrysostom entertained scruples which sprang from an overwhelming sense of his unworthiness, yet allowed all the while his bosom friend to suppose that they should both receive the rite of ordination together. Nothing could be further from his intention; he himself records the transaction in his "De Sacerdotio," without the slightest apology for his disingenuousness, or even the seeming suspicion that the proceeding was on