CHAPTER V.

ST AMBROSE AND THE AMBROSIAN HYMNS.

We have now reached a third stage in the history of Christian hymns. The inspired songs, recorded by inspired men, were succeeded by uninspired hymns, most precious to us as the record of the utterance of the Christian life of early times, though as authoritative foundations of faith not more valuable than the hymns of Luther or George Herbert. Yet the language remained the same as that of the inspired books. The hosannas of Ephraem the Syrian had the sound as well as the sense of those of the children of Jerusalem, and both were sung in a dialect kindred to that in which Israel first chanted the song of Moses, by the Red Sea. Clement of Alexandria, Gregory of Nazianzum, and the unknown earliest singers of the Oriental Churches, thought in the very words of evangelists and apostles; the phrases of the New Testament were literally their household words. Sacred song had not yet passed away from the two original sacred languages; but now a new language was to be consecrated. The stream of psalmody was to flow from the tongue of Homer, Plato, and the New Testament, into that of Virgil, Cicero, and the Vulgate; the ecclesiastical

language of so many centuries had to be moulded out of the sonorous old Roman speech.

The Latin hymns of the fourth and fifth centuries form quite a distinct school. They stand between the old world and the new; between the refinements of the ancient classical literature, and those who only knew Latin as an ecclesiastical or foreign language; between Greek and Gothic art; between the ancient Pagan civilisation, and that new Christian civilisation which was to rise at length to light after its long underground course in the middle ages. Their form links them with the old, and their substance with the new dynasty. They cling to the old rhythm, although in its least elaborate shape, and never descend to the barbarism of rhyme.

They are, perhaps, deficient in some qualities which severally shine in earlier and later Christian poetry. Compared with those of the Greek Church, they read rather like translations. And in a sense are they not translations? The wonderful flexibility of the Greek language adapted itself at once to the new flood of thought which had to pass into it. The delicacy of its subtle shades of meaning; the thunder and lightning of those single words which flash the power of a sentence on you in a moment, condensing the force of a phrase on a point; its endless reproductive faculty;-all these had been fused for centuries in the furnace of democratic assemblies, delicately chiselled by the subtlest philosophical intellects, fitted for every-day purposes by the constant use of a witty, lively, highly-educated people, when at length the men came who were to wield the perfect weapon for God and humanity. And the process of preparation was com

pleted by the Divine hand. The truths of Christianity flowed for the first time, in Greek, from inspired lips. With Latin it was quite different. The mighty new thought had to be fitted into the comparatively stiff and narrow mould of Roman speech, and the hands which were to accomplish the work were not those of apostles and evangelists.

Again, in comparing the early Latin hymns with those of the middle ages, there is perhaps one disadvantage on the side of the earlier. In the days of Ambrose, the language had not gathered around it the spiritual and ecclesiastical associations of centuries. It had to come into the church fresh from the market, the battle-field, or the court of justice, with no sacred laver of inspiration to baptize it from the stains and dust of secular or sinful employment.

Yet there is a calm and steady glow in these early Latin hymns, a straightforward plainness of speech, and an unconscious force, which grow on you wonderfully as you become more acquainted with them. If they have not the sublime simplicity of a faith which sees visions, and leaves it to fancy to scatter flowers, or the fervency of an outburst of solitary devotion,—the regular beauty of Greek art, or the imagination and homely pathos of Teutonic sacred ballads,—they have a Roman majesty of their own, the majesty of a national anthem, the subdued fire of the battle-song of a disciplined army. The imperial dignity of the great language of law and of war has passed into them; they are the grand national anthems of the Church militant, and their practical plainness, their healthy objective life, are bracing as mountain air.

Four names are especially associated with the Latin hymnology of what may be called the Ambrosian period; those of Ambrose, Augustine, Hilary, and Prudentius. Of these, the two latter are very shadowy beings to us, scarcely, indeed, more than names on the title-pages of their works.

There were three Hilarys who flourished within seventy years of each other: Hilary, a deacon at Rome, born in Sardinia, A.D. 354; Hilary of Poictiers, who died about A.D. 366, to whose personal and literary influence Neander assigns a large space in the history of his times; and Hilary of Arles, a canonised saint of the Roman calendar, who was born at the commencement of the sixth century. The three Hilarys were strenuous opponents of Arianism; all wrote against it, and there seems to be a difficulty in distributing to each his due share of literary honour. The Hilary who wrote the hymns was the canonised bishop of Arles. Born early in the sixth century, he appears to have lived a long life in a short time. He was an author from his youth, in his prime a popular preacher and bishop of the old Greek commercial colony of Arles, in Provence. He wrote some theological works, presided at a council, and died at the age of forty-nine, with a reputation which has made it seem natural to attribute to him one of the three great Creeds, and one of the three great Hymns of the Church; the Athanasian Creed and the "Te Deum." But, shadowy as the form is to us, the voice is clear; another "voice crying in the wilderness," and proclaiming the glory of the Son of God.

Prudentius is supposed to have been born in Spain about the middle of the fourth century. He filled im

portant judicial and military posts under the Emperor Honorius; but at the age of fifty-seven, repenting of the sinfulness of his previous life, and weary of its emptiness, he is said to have arisen to new aims, and dedicated himself, with all his powers and possessions, as best he knew, to God. He was a Christian literary man, and perhaps rather an author of religious poems than simply a hymn writer. One of his books has a significant title- "The War of the Soul." Those verses of his given in Daniel's "Thesaurus" are extracted from longer poems. The date of his death is not known.

With Ambrose and Augustine the case is different. Ambrose stands before us in himself a complete historical picture, a representative portrait of his times, although revealed to us rather as an historical personage than as a man and a brother in the great Christian family.

Augustine's spiritual history has probably had more influence on the Christian life of fifteen centuries, than the history of any other human being except St Paul. He is one of the very few men of past times whose heart we seem to know; whose writings are not preached to us from the pulpit of history, but spoken in the voice of a friend.

The biographies of Ambrose and Augustine might be combined into a complete compendium of the ecclesiastical history of their times, the one reflecting its more external features, and the other its inward spiritual conflicts; Ambrose representing the relations between church and state, bishops and emperors, and Augustine the relation between the soul and truth.