ever, ordained a deacon by Meletius, and about six years after a presbyter by Flavian, the successor of Meletius. As he was not allowed, while a deacon, to preach in public, his great abilities were not fully displayed till after he became a presbyter. Being now the principal and most intimate assistant of his bishop, and occupying the highest place in his esteem, he soon had most ample opportunity for extensive usefulness, as the distinguished preacher of a large congregation embracing, it was estimated, a hundred thousand souls. In the second year after he became a presbyter, occurred the insurrection at Antioch, in which the stat nes of the imperial family were destroyed, and the city was in consequence subjected to great suffering. This was the occasion of his preaching the celebrated twenty-one discourses on the Statues. In these discourses, he did not restrict himself to the public calamities, though these were at the time matters of chief interest to the people of Antioch. He rather employed the occasion to expose such delinquencies of the Christians as gave them little solicitude, and to show the necessity of amendment. His activity in the ministry, besides the proof of it thus furnished, was so great that few days passed without his preaching in public.

For twelve years he labored at Antioch; and the fame of his eloquence and of his virtues had spread through the whole East. His promotion to a more distinguished post of influence, which might seem but the just recompense of his great merits, was, nev ertheless, consequent on the accidental circumstance that Eutropius, the favorite of the emperor Arcadius, happening to be in Antioch, was filled with admiration at his remarkable eloquence. On the death of Nectarius, bishop of Constantinople, in the year 397, Eutropius proposed Chrysostom as the successor to that of fice. The church of Constantinople, assailed from all quarters by competitors for the vacant bishopric, could not form a decision, and at length solicited the emperor himself to appoint a bishop of approved abilities. With this the influence of the powerful chamberlain, Eutropius, was conjoined, and Chrysostom was selected.2

which he accounts for his declining the election, and unfolds his views of the high dignity of the sacred office.

1 1 Antioch had a population of 200,000; one half professing the Christian religion.-TR.

This transfer to the highest post of the Eastern church was effected by authority and artifice, without seeking Chrysostom's consent. "Every preparation," says Neander, "being made, he was enticed out of the city of Antioch under a false

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Career as a Preacher.

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This new office, however, far from adding to his welfare, was on the contrary the occasion of his two exiles, and at length of his death; a well nigh violent death.

Animated with the most intense zeal for purity of morals, yet seeking to bring about reforms by applying ascetic principles, and often condemning even allowable gratifications; cherishing the loftiest ideas of the dignity and the duties of his office, at the same time disregarding the claims of the world, and particularly not heeding customs which excessive refinement and court-society had introduced; strict, in all respects, towards himself, making no allowance for human frailties; inclined to asperity in his judgments from his own consciousness of moral purity, and inspired with hatred of the prevalent corruption of the church; maintaining, also, a proud distance from every one whose virtue was stained-it could not but be, that, on taking up his abode at Constantinople with such peculiarities both of nature and education, he would make to himself many friends and admirers and equally many embittered enemies. The former he found in the middle and lower classes; the latter, among the higher and even among the clergy. To the better part of his people he was a model of the noblest virtues, a pattern of sobriety, of clerical dignity and activity. He was a friend of the poor, a protector of the oppressed, an unsparing judge of the wealthy and corrupt dignitaries. These last hated him as an enemy of their covetousness and licentiousness, of the baseness to which the men stooped, and the luxury and sensuality in which the women and widows of rank indulged; as a stern censor of the haughtiness of the great, and of the hypocrisy and corruption of the clergy. In these circumstances, and considering the power of the last-mentioned classes, it could not long remain doubtful what destiny awaited him. The hatred of the men in power and of the clergy, long sought for a pretext against him; but the most of his people were so fond of his preaching, that they clung to him with an affection that made it no easy thing to dispossess him of his office. Besides, in the distress which the seditious Goth, Gainas, had brought on the city and on the whole empire, Chrysostom had rendered services too great to be overlooked by the weak emperor.

As, however, he did not in his preaching spare the superstitious and corrupt empress Eudoxia, his numerous and powerful foes

pretext, in order to forestall his refusal and prevent the disorders which his congregation, who were so attached to him, might raise; and he was sent to Constantinople."-TR.

prevailed, at length, in a synod held at the Oak,1 and composed of men unfriendly to him, to displace from office this mortally hated archbishop and his associates. The charges which they brought against him consisted, in part, of matters entirely alien from his character and wholly fictitious, and, in part, of wilful perversions and exaggerations; or were accusations which, in the judgment of every impartial person, could not but redound more. to his honor than to his discredit. But however deficient these charges were in truth and force, this was compensated by the influence and malice of his opponents. His life, even, was in danger; for his enemies had laid against him complaints of high treason, accusing him of having in a sermon called the empress Eudoxia a Jezebel; and perhaps he did, on some occasion, thus express himself. Neither the empress, however, nor his other powerful adversaries, among whom several women of blemished reputation, yet considerable for their rank and wealth, played a chief part, could prevail on the weak Arcadius to condemn him. To take a man's life whom so many bishops and the whole Christian community regarded with the highest love and reverence, seemed to the emperor too dangerous a step. He could not get Chrysostom into his power; for the people, three days successively, guarded the bishop's palace, and requested, as did Chry. sostom himself, that the matter might be examined before an im partial and a larger synod. But when Chrysostom saw that the people's opposition to the authority of the State was likely to occasion bloodshed, he privately withdrew from the protection of his friends and surrendered himself to his enemies. He was conveyed away to the coast of Bithynia; but after a few days was recalled. This sudden recall resulted from the joint influence of the continued threatening excitement of the people, of a violent earthquake which had filled the superstitious Eudoxia with remorse of con science, and of the representations of some of Chrysostom's friends in the imperial court. He was received with signal demonstrations of respect and amid the unbounded joy of the people.2

1 Chrysostom's opponents deemed it unsafe to arraign him in Constantinople itself. The members of the synod repaired, therefore, to Chalcedon in the vicinity, and thence to a suburb of Chalcedon, named the Oak, and held their session in a church at that place.-TR.

"The Bosphorus," says Gibbon, " was covered with innumerable vessels; the shores of Europe and Asia were profusely illuminated; and the acclamations of a victorious people accompanied, from the port to the cathedral, the triumph of the archbishop."-TB.

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Incidents in his Life.

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But the quiet between him and the empress continued only two months. He had again censured her in his usual harsh manner, and found fault with the extravagant veneration which the people paid to her statue; and he is said to have commenced the sermon on the festival of the martyrdom of John the Baptist with an allusion to the empress and to his own proper name John, in these words: "Herodias rages anew; anew she is excited; anew she dances; anew she seeks to receive in a platter the head of John." From that time, the empress swore an unappeasable hostility to this unsparing orator. In connection with other ene

mies of Chrysostom, she succeeded, at a synod, in having him deposed a second time, and in procuring a decree for his banishment. But neither on this occasion could his enemies effect his removal from the city, till he delivered himself up in order to terminate the shocking and bloody acts of violence to which his adherents were exposed.

It was only for a few years, however, that he thus escaped the hands of hired assassins, from whom even in his own palace he had been in danger of his life. For his enemies, indignant at his finding friends even in his banishment at Cucusus, at his still exerting his influence in many parts of the East and even of the West, and at his adherents' continued attachment to him, procured an additional decree from Arcadius, by virtue of which he was to be removed to Pityus, a town on the eastern desert coast of the Euxine and near the extreme limits of the empire. The

1 Paniel here refers to the authority of Socrates. The sentence which he quotes from Socrates (Hist. Eccl. VI. 16.) contains the historical error respecting Herodias' dancing.

"The three years," says Gibbon, "which he spent at Cucusus and the neighboring town of Arabissus, were the last and most glorious of his life. His character was consecrated by absence and persecution; the faults of his administration were no longer remembered, but every tongue repeated the praises of his genius and virtue; and the respectful attention of the Christian world was fixed on a desert spot amid the mountains of Taurus. From that solitude the archbishop, whose active mind was invigorated by misfortunes, maintained a strict and frequent correspondence with the most distant provinces; exhorted the separate congregation of his faithful adherents to persevere in their allegiance; urged the destruction of the temples of Phoenicia, and the extirpation of heresy in the isle of Cyprus; extended his pastoral care to the missions of Persia and Scythia; negotiated, by his ambassadors, with the Roman pontiff and the emperor Honorius; and boldly appealed from a partial synod, to the supreme tribunal of a free and general council, The mind of the illustrious exile was still independent; but his captive body was exposed to the revenge of the oppressors, who continued to abuse the name and authority of Arcadius."-TR.

inhuman treatment he suffered during this journey, was too much for a constitution already enfeebled by the abuses he had so long endured. The noble sufferer did not reach the place of his banishment. Death overtook him on the way, in Comana, a city of Pontus. He expired, September 14th, in the year 407, with his favorite expression on his lips, " God be praised for everything."

His sixth successor in the bishopric of Constantinople had his remains removed to that city in the year 438, where they were received with marked reverence and with great pomp.

Such is a slight outline of the life and death of a preacher, of whom it may be justly said that all his prosperity and adversity, the honor to which he attained and the indignities which he suf fered, his premature, and, in part, violent end, as well as his imperishable fame, sprung almost exclusively from his great eloquence and from the most praise-worthy, though not wholly unexceptionable, manner in which he employed it. Other celebrated preachers of antiquity, as Origen, Athanasius, Basil, Gregory of Nazianzum, also experienced the diversified lot of persecution and of respect, and have established the credit of their names even to our day. But in no one of thein was it pulpit oratory that caused both the pleasing and the painful events of life, so entirely as in Chrysostom. Their distinction resulted, in a great measure, from causes other than oratorical merit. But whatever distinc tion Chrysostom obtained by other services, his pulpit, eloquence was the central point around which everything gathered that af fected him for good or for evil, during his life and after his death.1

Chrysostom's Training for the Pulpit.

We pass now to the inquiry, How did Chrysostom become so distinguished an orator? In reply, it must first be said, that he was naturally endowed with most eminent oratorical talents. A strong, penetrating and comprehensive mind, a brilliant invention, an inexhaustible imagination, an abundant vein of wit, presence

1 It has always been the case that men of inferior abilities have, through want of extensive views, passed an unfavorable judgment on the spirit and sentiments of men of distinguished endowments, and have traced the calamities which have fallen to their lot, not to the envy and treachery of those with whom they had to act, but to their own failings. So it has been in respect to Chrysostom. The historian, Socrates, who is generally a discriminating man, accuses him, in quite an extravagant manner, of indiscretion in his judgment and conduct, of anger, of weakness towards his favorites, and of haughtiness. The most of these objections have always been made against eminent men.