I.

BIRTH AND INFANCY.

AD 340-341.

It is the year AD 340. Twenty-eight years have passed since Constantine the Great saw, as he declared, in vision the symbol of the Crucified, and was bidden to hope for victory, temporal and eternal, through Him alone; twenty-eight years since the tyrant Maxentius lost his power and his life at the Milvian bridge; twenty-seven since Constantine’s second edict, dated not from Rome, but from Milan, released the Christians from the fear of persecution, and launched the Cross on an unimpeded career of conquest.

It is fifteen years since the memorable time when the three hundred and eighteen at Nicaea affirmed, in the happy word Consubstantial, the truth of the Incarnation of the Eternal Son, very God of very God, made very man; four since the unhappy heresiarch Arius perished at Constantinople by a strange and sudden death; seven since the busy brain of another enemy of the faith, not heretic, but scoffer, Iamblichus, of Chalcis in Syria (once the kingdom of Herod Agrippa II), was stilled in the grave; three since the great Emperor himself deceased, and left his empire to a triad of unworthy and incapable sons; and but a few days since Constantine, the eldest of them, grasping at the dominions of Constans, the youngest, was slain by his partisans—a death so well deserved, and yet so melancholy in its circumstances, that we doubt whether to call its infliction an act of stern justice, or a miserable fratricide.

Julius I is Bishop of Rome; the mitre of Constantinople is still worn by the pious Alexander, the aged opponent of Arius.

Eusebius, the historian and courtly confessor of Constantine the Great, is sinking into his grave at Caesarea in Palestine.

The great St. Basil and his brother Gregory, afterwards named of Nyssa, are children of eleven and nine at another Caesarea in Cappadocia. At the same Caesarea his friend, Gregory of Nazianzus, now a youth of fifteen, has been receiving his early education, and is now preparing, at Eusebius’s Caesarea, for his finishing studies at Alexandria and Athens.

St. Epiphanius, now thirty years old, is studying and praying at his monastery of Ad, in Palestine, and St. Ephraem the Syrian is similarly engaged at Nisibis.

St. Cyril has lately been ordained presbyter at Jerusalem. The great Athanasius, now in his forty-third year, is at Alexandria, contending at once against calumny and heresy, and compelled to unite the vindication of his own moral character with his strenuous defence of the faith.

St. Jerome is a boy of nine, eagerly preparing for the time when he shall leave his Dalmatian home to study in the great Roman metropolis.

Another translator of the Scriptures, Ulfilas the Goth, is now about the same age, and is being trained, somewhere in the farther East, for his future work.

Martin the Pannonian, destined hereafter to hold the episcopal office at Tours during exactly the same years as Ambrose at Milan (374-397), is now serving in the army, a young officer of four-and-twenty.

Prince Julian, now some nine years of age, is safe at the castle of Macellum, near Caesarea, with his brother Callus, learning that Christianity which he is ere long to reject for a philosophized heathenism.

Photinus, at Sirmium, is concocting a heresy, to be published some three years later, and promptly repudiated alike by Catholic and Arian.

At Carthage the Donatists have been availing themselves of the Toleration Decree of 321 to propagate that schism which was not the least of the causes that wrought the destruction of the Church of North Africa.

It is a remarkable time, if any time can be termed specially remarkable in the history of that standing miracle, the Church of Christ. Many a living Christian remembers vividly the horrors of the tenth persecution; not a few literally “bear in their bodies the marks of the Lord Jesus”; but things are now strangely altered. Kings and queens are becoming nursing fathers and nursing mothers of the Church; the Empire no longer persecutes, but recognizes Christianity; and the only question, a question as yet unsettled, is, which form it shall recognize, whether the philosophical religion that Artemon and Paul of Samosata and Arius have embellished with their eloquence and systematized with all their intellectual power, or the simple yet wondrous faith revealed in Scripture, preached and witnessed by many a saint, affirmed by the fathers of Nicaea, and earnestly contended for by Athanasius, the faith of the Catholic Church, that Jesus Christ is “very God of very God”.

DELAY OF BAPTISM.

There is a commotion in the house of Ambrosius, the Christian Prefect of the Gauls—lord lieutenant, as we should say, of France, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Spain, Portugal, and Great Britain. Whether the house is at Treves, or Arles, or Lyons, it is impossible to gather from the records we possess. But, wherever it is, the Prefect is told that he is the father of a third child and a second son, and decides that the infant shall bear his own name, Ambrosius, “the Immortal”, a poetical equivalent of Athanasius, the “Deathless”.

Though the elder Ambrosius was a Christian, the child was not brought to the font. The christening, which now for many centuries has followed close upon birth, was in the fourth century more usually deferred. Infant baptism was practised, but it was the exception, not the rule. The newly-born infant was claimed from the powers of evil and dedicated to God by an office of exorcism and benediction, in which salt and the sign of the cross were employed; but the Sacrament of the new birth was postponed, not from the idea that infants are incapable of grace, or that the benefits of the Sacrament are limited to those who have attained a particular stage of intellectual development, but because Christians felt strongly that the Church’s one baptism was “for the remission of sins”, and habitually took what we may call an exaggerated and rather Novatian view of the heinousness of post-baptismal sin.

Baptism was deferred as long as possible, in order that the catechumen might receive in it a plenary absolution, not only from original guilt, but also from actual sin, and might be in less danger of staining the robe of the new-born through the heedlessness of youth. And there was an unworthy notion, too, that an unbaptized man might safely do much as he liked;—“let him do what he chooses, for he is not yet baptized” is an expression which St. Augustine has recorded for us;—but that, once baptized, he was tied to a stricter life; and friends were loth to curtail the possible pleasure of the young, and bind them down to what was wrongly imagined to be a round of gloomy austerities.

Precisely the same error exists among ourselves, and withholds many a one who has received Baptism and Confirmation from the Lord’s Table; the carelessness about transgressions before baptism, the horror at those committed after it, are by us transferred to pre-Eucharistic and post-Eucharistic sins. It was this dread of committing himself to too much which no doubt led to the delay in the Baptism of Constantine the Great.

We must remember, also, that in the earlier days of the Church, over and above the ordinary temptations to which humanity is exposed, there was a special danger of which we know nothing, that of apostasy in persecution. It was natural for pious parents to hesitate, and shrink from bringing an infant to the laver of regeneration when it was not impossible that they and all its Christian friends might be called to bear witness in death to their Master’s name, and their little one be left an orphan, to be educated in a Pagan home. Such reluctance was not right, perhaps; it would have been best to obey the Master’s command, and leave the future to Him; but it was certainly natural, and perhaps, under the circumstances, hardly blamable. as arising from an exalted view of the greatness of the Sacrament, and the holiness of the baptized.

At the period of Ambrose’s birth, and possibly in his case, there was another reason which induced, or rather compelled, Catholic Christians to delay Baptism. So widely had Arianism spread, and so much had it been patronized by those in high places, that it was not always easy, and indeed was in some places impossible, to find a bishop or presbyter who could be relied on to administer the sacrament with the valid formula. The divinely revealed form of words was too often altered so as not to clash with the sentiments of the Arians; and the orthodox were obliged to defer baptism, lest in accepting the ministrations of an Arianizing bishop they should be involved in the difficulties attending a ceremony of doubtful validity; lest, if the officiant chose to employ an irregular form, they should have to choose between leaving the catechumen possibly unbaptized after all, and incurring the risk of sacrilegious iteration of a sufficient sacrament.

INFANCY.

One story of the infancy of Ambrose has been preserved. His cradle had been placed in the open court of the Prefect’s house, no doubt for the sake of air and coolness, since the cells which, under the name of cubicula, were all that even the proudest Roman mansions possessed as bed-chambers, must have been sadly deficient in ventilation, and unsuitable for nursery purposes. It was the time of year when bees are abroad—probably the spring of 341,—and a swarm entered the court, and settled upon the sleeping infant’s head, crawling in and out of the mouth, as though it were the entrance to a hive. The nurse was for endeavoring to drive them away; and had she carried out her intentions the child’s life would have been in deadly peril. Happily, the father and mother were close at hand, and stopped her forthwith, waiting, says Paulinus, to see what would be the termination of the marvel; or, as we, looking at the occurrence in a more matter-of-fact way, should imagine, understanding the habits of swarming bees better than their domestic did. Whatever the risk of leaving the creatures alone, the danger of disturbing them would have been far greater. After a time they quitted the cradle, and flew upwards till they were out of sight; and the Prefect, with a sigh of relief, exclaimed, “If the boy lives, he will surely turn out something great”

It was a natural exclamation enough when a son had been preserved from what appeared a considerable peril. But the belief in omens still subsisted in Gaul, and was not confined to the heathen; indeed, we can hardly say with truth that it has yet disappeared from any part of the prefecture of Ambrosius, even from those islands which formed its north-western extremity; and the event was held to betoken the holy eloquence and sweet persuasiveness which should, in time to come, distinguish the unconscious occupant of the cradle.