between himself and the spirit of his age. "Ambrose," says he (ii. 270), "occupies a high position among the Fathers ; and there was a vigor and dignity in his character, as well as a vivid intelligence, which must command respect ; but in proportion as we assign praise to the man, individually, we condemn the system which could so far vitiate a noble mind, and impel one so lofty in temper to act a part which heathen philosophers would utterly have abhorred." ' " Invenimus mirae magnitudinis viros duos, ut prisca aetas ferebat, ossa omnia Integra, sanguinis plurimun^ ! " Did Ambrose really believe that men in the first century (prisca aetas) were of greater bodily stature than his contemporaries in the fourth ? But especially absurd is the mass of fresh blood, which then was exported throughout Christendom as a panacea. According to Romish tradition, the blood of many saiufci, as of Januarius in Naples, becomes liquid every year. Taylor thiuks, the miraculously healed Severus, by trade a butcher, had something to do with this blood. ^ '• Et tactu ipso medicabilia rcposcuntur." § 87. WORSHIP OF RELICS. DOGMA OF THE KEBUKRECTION. 459 ing of the blind' man against the doubts of the Arians, and speaks of it as a nniversally acknowledged and undeniable fact : The healed man, Severus, is well known, and publicly testifies that he received his sight by the contact of the cover- ing of the holy relics. Jerome calls Yigilantius, for his opposition to the idolatrous veneration of ashes and bones, a wretched man, whose condi- tion cannot be sufficiently pitied, a Samaritan and Jew, who considered the dead unclean ; but he protects himself against the charge of superstition. We honor the relics of the mar- tyrs, says he, that we may adore the God of the martyrs ; we honor the servants, in order thereby to honor the Master, who has said : " He that receiveth you, receiveth me." ' The saints are not dead ; for the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is not a God of the dead, but of the living. iS^either are they en- closed in Abraham's bosom as in a prison till the day of judg- ment, but they follow the Lamb whithersoever he goeth.'* Augustme believed in the above-mentioned miraculous dis- covery of the bodies of Gervasius and Protasius, and the heal- ing of the blind man by contact with them, because he himself was then in Milan, in 386, at the time of his conversion,^ and was an eye-witness, not indeed of the discovery of the bones — for this he nowhere says — but of, the miracles, and of the great stir among the people.* He gave credit likewise to the many miraculous cures which the bones of the first martyr Stephen are said to have performed in various parts of Africa in his time.^ These relics were discovered in 415, nearly four centuries after the stoning of Stephen, in an