achieved, now that she had seen her one longing gratified and her son baptised a Christian. Five or six days later, while they were still waiting to embark, Monica was struck down by fever, and died in the fifty-sixth year of her age. It was in the Psalms that Augustine found comfort in his sorrow. When the first gush of weeping was over, his friend, Euodius took up the Psalter, and began to sing, the whole household joining with him, Psalm ci. "My song shall be of mercy and judgement: unto Thee, O Lord, will I sing," etc. Forty-three years later, in his own city of Hippo, closely besieged by the Vandals, Augustine himself died. "It was," says his biographer, Possidius," a plain and barely furnished room in which he lay. The seven Penitential Psalms were, by his orders, written out, and placed where he could see them from his bed. These he looked at and read in his days of sickness, weeping often and sore." So, with his eyes fixed on the Psalms, Augustine passed to his rest, August 28th, 430. It was with the words of a Psalm upon his lips, "Into Thy hands I commend my spirit " (Ps. xxxi., verse 6), that Basil the Great breathed his last at Cesarea, January 1st, 379, his deathbed surrounded by citizens who were ready to shorten their own lives, if so they might lengthen the days of their Bishop. In 397, Ambrose lay dying at Milan. He had, as is well known, introduced into the Western Church the antiphonal method of chanting the Psalms which was practised in the East. Almost his last labour was a Commentary on Ps. xliv.: " It is painful to wait so long for the day when mortality shall be swallowed up of Life; but, happily the torch of the Word of God does not quit mine eyes." He died as he reached verse 23: Up, Lord, why sleepest thou: awake and be not absent from us for ever." Paulinus, Bishop of Nola (353-431), as the hour for Vespers approached, and the lamps were being lighted in the church which he had built, stretched forth his hands and passed away, repeating the words, "I have ordained a lantern for mine Anointed." (Ps. cxxxii. 18). With the same words on his lips, in June 444, died Cyril, Archbishop of Alexandria, whose life-long struggle for the purity of the Christian faith has been overshadowed by his alleged complicity in the hideous crime of the murder of Hypatia. But if we pass from domestic or deathbed scenes to episodes of a more public character, the recorded instances of the influence of the Psalms are multiplied. No figure in the early history of the Church is more attractive than that of Origen (185-253). The son of a martyr, the master of disciples who braved martyrdom, himself a confessor who endured imprisonment and the torture of the chain, the collar and the rack, he dominated the century as much by his character as by his genius. In his childhood, as is told above, he vied with his mother in singing the Psalms, and his commentary upon them, his notes, and his homilies bore witness to their abiding influence on his mind. During the persecution of Severus, his father, Leonides, was beheaded, encouraged by Origen, then a lad of seventeen, to die without thought of those he left behind. The lad himself was only prevented from sharing his father's fate by being imprisoned in his own home. In after years, the persecutions which he endured from the State as a Christian scarcely exceeded those which, as a heretic, he suffered from the Church. Yet friends were as enthusiastic as enemies were bitter. Even those who compared him to Satan paid homage to his gifts by admitting that, if he had fallen from Heaven, his fall was like the lightning flash. Driven from Alexandria, he travelled from place to place, fascinating some by the splendour of his teaching, terrifying others by the boldness of his speculations. So journeying, as the story is told, he came to Jerusalem. Somewhere in his wanderings, even his intrepid spirit had recoiled from dread of torture. He had consented to sacrifice to Cæsar; incense had been thrust into his hand, which was forced over the altar. Remorse overwhelmed him, when, at Jerusalem, he was entreated to preach. Taking the Psalter in his hand, he prayed, and, opening the book, read the words of Ps. 1., verse 16, "But unto the ungodly said God: Why dost thou preach My laws, and takest My covenant in thy mouth? sat down speechless, and burst into tears. David himself shut the door of my lips," lament, as he applied to his apostasy the verse (Ps. lxxx. 13), The wild boar out of the wood doth root it up; and the wild beasts of the field devour it." He shut the book, "The prophet was his bitter As the fourth century dawns, the long struggle between Paganism and Christianity entered its final stage. On the death-agony of the ancient faith, still enshrined among us by lingering superstitions and a thousand graceful fictions in art and literature, history is comparatively silent. But its downfall was marked by a period of moral relaxation and social corruption, which fostered the belief that it was the highest duty of a Christian to shun a polluted world. The longing to flee away and be at rest from the fury of persecution, and from the contamination of the heathen, encouraged the growing feeling. Solitude tempted some men as a refuge from spiritual danger; to others it appealed as a bolder challenge to the powers of evil; to yet another class it seemed to offer at once a shelter from the world, and the supreme test of self-denial. Of the ascetic principle, the most famous example was Antony (251-356), born in the lifetime of Origen, known throughout civilisation by the pictures of Caracci, Guido, and Salvator, and by the quaint legends that have gathered round his name. The influence which he and his followers exercised upon Christendom, and the impulse which they gave to the monastic life, are almost incalculable. A psalm was at once the weapon, the pæan, and the rule, of two of the earliest leaders in the new movement. Rich, young, and an orphan, Antony gave all his possessions to the poor, and devoted himself to the ascetic life. Unlike the anchorites who had preceded him, he retired to a distance from his fellow-men. To combine in himself the special virtues, to which other ascetics had respectively attained, was his constant effort. To be as prayerful as one, as courteous as another, as patient of vigil and fast as a third-this was the rivalry on which his ambitions were centred. There were times, for he was still young, when his enthusiasm failed, his courage flagged, and the temptations of the world and the flesh swept over him with all their storms. Yet still his faith triumphed over every assault. The Psalms were the weapons with which he met the evil tendencies that, to his overwrought vision, presented themselves in material and often grotesque forms. It was, for example, with the words, "Some put their trust in chariots, and some in horses: but we will remember the Name of the Lord our God" (Ps. xx., verse 7), that he put Satan to flight. It was with a psalm that he sang his pæan of victory. So sorely beset was he within the ruined tower where he lived, so vehement were the sounds of the strife, that the multitude, which had gathered to see and hear him, believed that the saint was attacked by the people of the country. Suddenly the clamour ceased. High and clear rose the voice of Antony alone, as he chanted Ps. Ixviii. in triumph at his victory over his spiritual foes. Is Browning's use of the same words an echo of St. Antony? As Giuseppe Caponsacchi watches by the side of Pompilia, hears her moaning in her restless fevered dreams, and sees her wave away some evil spirit that threatens her, he cries: 66 'Oh, if the God, that only can, would help! Am I his priest with power to cast out fiends? Be scattered! By morn, there was peace, no sigh Among Antony's most distinguished disciples was Pambo. Eminent for his austerities, he had taken for his special rule of life the words of Ps. xxxix., verse 1, "I said, I will take heed to my ways, that I offend not in my tongue," and, in his constant effort to keep the door of his lips, he is said to have excelled even Antony himself. Half in banter, half in earnest, Browning describes Pambo,2 arms crossed, brow bent, thought-immersed," from youth to age pondering over the verse, and finding in the seeming simplicity of the command enough to absorb every faculty of mind and body, so long as life endured. The influence of Antony and other hermits spread from Africa to Asia. Monastic communities multiplied rapidly, and in their religious services the Psalms held the chief place. Of such communities in Eastern Christendom, Basil (329-79) was the chief organiser. The secluded place, in which he himself fixed his own temporary retreat, lay on the banks of the river Iris, near Neo-Cesarea in Pontus-a spot as beauti ful in his eyes as Calypso's Island." He describes the devotional exercises which his communities of monks 1 The Ring and the Book, Giuseppe Caponsacchi, 1300-1304. B practised. While it was yet night, the brethren rose, as in the days of persecution Christians had risen for concealment, entered the house of prayer, and, after confession to God, turned to the singing of psalms. Now, divided two by two, they answered each other; now, one led the chant, the rest following. Thus passed the night till the day began to dawn. As morning broke, they all in common, with one mouth and from one heart, lifted to the Lord the Psalm of Confession (Ps. cxviii.). As the day began, so it ended. Nor was the fame of the Egyptian anchorites confined to the East. It crossed the sea to Europe. In Roman society, as the fourth century advanced, two opposite tendencies were equally marked. A startling contrast was presented between the unbridled luxury of the Imperial City and its inclination to the solitude and severity of monastic life. From 340 to 343 Athanasius, an exile and a fugitive, had found a refuge at Rome. The spell of his master-mind, his enthusiasm for the monks of the desert, the life of Antony, and the presence of two Egyptian anchorites, seized the imagination of Roman patricians. Slumbering fire leaped into flame, as Athanasius revealed the grandeur of human self-abnegation, and he thus became, through Antony, the spiritual ancestor of Western monasticism. A few years later, Marcella, a young and wealthy Roman widow, who had, as a child, heard from the lips of Athanasius descriptions of the Thebaid and of Antony, bade adieu to the world, and made of her palace on the Aventine Mount her cell, and of its garden her desert. Round her gathered a little knot of women, like-minded with herself, who devoted their lives to the study of the Scriptures, psalmody, prayer and good works. That they might sing the Psalms in the native tongue, they learned Hebrew; that they might study the Gospels, they learned Greek. Among the most illustrious of these women was the highborn Paula, whose ancestors were the Scipios and the Gracchi, and in whose veins ran the blood of the half-fabulous rulers of Sparta and Mycene. She and her daughters, Blesilla, Paulina, and Eustochium, and her grand-daughter Paula, breathe and speak and move in the glowing pages of Jerome. To Paula's daughter, Eustochium, is addressed the first code 1 |