judgment uncared for to the custody of others, or exercise it uncontrolled in the license of his own will still there is this great truth before him, that in some way, either higher or lower, Religion is the first, because it is the most lasting subject of human life. And for the second pursuit-Biography—even that of great captains, great lawyers, or great statesmen, carries with it to the minds of all the most instructive interest; but when Biography is combined with Religion, and we behold before us the great and good of ancient times in the things of God, then such a study becomes doubly interesting, and brings with it a double fruit, because therein is combined the highest order of subject matter with the highest order of human character.

To see how from small beginnings greatness and celebrity have been achieved; to watch in the child the first symptoms of the spirit which afterwards has led to wonderful and heroic actions, leading on the human race under its guidance to grandeur and glory, is, even in temporal things, a sight beautiful to look upon, and the life even of Alexander or Napoleon has a charm about it, which surpasses the more philosophical analysis of the mere historian.

How much more so is this the case when we pass away from the temporal history of men to their spiritual history; and how much more so still, when we advance into the ages when the Church first began, and behold her early bishops, martyrs, and confessors, rising up before us, and, with the Spirit of God, subduing the world, and winning nations to the fold of Christ.

In the biography of the first Christian ages, men seem to spring forth, not as they do now from the ordinary repose of a quiescent orthodoxy; but there is rather a suddenness of life assumed, sometimes out of direct heathenism, or sometimes out of that carnal philosophy which so long polluted and disturbed the ancient world. Great Christians seem to issue into life, as it were, full armed, a sort of Cadmean progeny; such, for instance, as St. Ambrose, a layman one day-chosen bishop the next. They fight the battles of a faith which they learn, not from parents, nor from schools, but from the special intervention of the Holy Spirit; they plunge in the first ardour of the divine light into the deepest truths of the Gospel, and master them at once; they bear the Cross deeply set within their hearts, and sustained on high in