d

he had received it from his ancestors. His vigorous opposition of heresy was sufficiently seen in his attempts against the principal sects then on foot, the followers of Arius, Sabellius, Photinus, Marcellus, Macedonius, Eunomius, Apollinaris, who felt the effects of his great abilities, and his masculine zeal. And herein no proposals how advantageous soever could bias him, no dangers terrify or unsettle him. Witness his unshaken constancy under the malicious insinuations of his enemies; the potent assaults of the great ministers of state; his generous slighting at once both the frowns and favours of the Arian emperor; his writing letters at the same time to confirm the wavering and retrieve the lapsed, when it was not safe to do it at less than the peril of his head; and when, like Elijah in the reign of Ahab, he was in a manner left alone to stand up for a good cause in an evil time. Nor was his life in all other instances less pious and exemplary, being conducted by the strictest rules and measures of religion. He lived above the world, and with a noble scorn looked down upon the glory, the pomps, plenty, grandeur, luxuries, and pleasures of it; his riches were to possess nothing, and he esteemed the cross beyond all other treasures. His appetites were most chaste and regular, and which he had perfectly subdued to the discipline of mortification and selfdenial. His diet mean and small; so little, that he seemed to live without it, and to have put on beforehand the life of angels. His wardrobe afforded but one coat and a pallium, the cold ground was his bed, bread and salt his ordinary bill of fare, and the next spring his cellar, whither he retired to quench his thirst. But what he wanted towards himself, he made up in care towards others, in his incomparable charity to the poor. What estate he had (which was not inconsiderable) he disposed that way, and where his own fell short, he persuaded a liberal supply out of the purses of the rich, wherewith he erected and endowed a noble hospital without the city, whereinto he gathered all the sick, the lame, the diseased, that were about the city, unable to help themselves, and not easily helped by others. So that the streets and highways were no longer pestered with those lamentable spectacles of want, anguish, and misery, that had lately filled every corner. Here all necessaries were provided for them, the superintendency whereof himself undertook; and that he might

d Greg. Naz. Orat. xx. p. 357, etc.

set a good example to others, he stooped to the meanest offices about them, not disdaining to kiss and embrace the worst of the patients, at whose stench and sores others were ready nicely to recoil and start back. By which it is evident how unjustly he was accused by some of being proud, a weed not likely to thrive in so harassed and mortified a soul; his kind behaviour, known condescension to all ranks of men, his equal and patient bearing the freest reproofs and admonitions of his friends,* being a sufficient confutation of that groundless slander. It was no doubt the gravity and constancy of his temper, and his uncourtly incompliance with some men's humours, fastened that charge upon him, Nor was he of a sour and morose disposition; in company none more pleasant and cheerful, none more facetiously witty; when he reproved, none did it more gently, so as neither the fierceness of the reproof made the person insolent, nor the softness of it rendered it ineffectual. He was, in short, a calm, harmless, and quiet person: and though in his latter time, through the iniquity of the age he lived in, he became a man of strife and contention, yet in himself he was of an humble and peaceable temper; kind to, and beloved by all good men, and revered by his greatest enemies. If, after all, any one be curious to know what kind of body it was that clothed so brave and great a soul, we find him thus described:f he was tall and straight, lean and meagre, of a brown complexion but somewhat ruddy, his nose of a just dimension, his eye-brows large and almost circular, his look musing and thoughtful, few wrinkles in his face, and those not unbecoming; his visage long, his temples somewhat hollow, and his beard prolix. In his younger days he was of a fresh and florid complexion, of an healthful and well-built constitution, till over-intense study, excessive fasting and abstinence, and the many troubles he met with, pulled him down, impaired his health, and subjected him to habitual weaknesses and infirmities, (whereof he complains almost in every epistle,) besides those more violent distempers that frequently rushed upon him. I only add, that so great was the veneration which the world then had for him, that many affected even his bodily imperfections,"

e Vid. Epist. ccxliv. s. 1.

1 Mæn. Græc. Tŷ a Toû 'Iavovs. sub. lit. auu. Vid. etiam. Ex. cod. Vatic. ap. Bar. ad Ann. 378. Id. ibid. p. 370.

Greg. Naz. Orat. xx. p. 323.

and his odd accidental customs, as an ornament; striving to imitate the paleness of his looks, the fashion of his beard, the manner of his gait, his sparingness of speech, deep musing and thoughtfulness, his garb and apparel, and the manner of his diet and lodging; things in respect of him purely casual and unaffected.

IV. Of the works that he left behind him, some have been buried under the ruins of time, there being evidence enough that he wrote more than what have been transmitted to us. Amongst those that remain, some are unduly ascribed to him, in which number are the ten and eleven Homilies upon the Hexaemeron, generally thought (but, for any thing I see, without any cogent reason) to have been added by his brother Nyssen; the Encomium vitæ solitariæ, or de laudibus Eremi, nowhere found in Greek, and in truth is a piece of Peter Damian, besides several others extant in the last volumes of his works. His genuine writings consist of commentaries, controversies, sermons, encomiastics, epistles, and canonical tracts. Amongst the first are his commentaries upon the first sixteen chapters of the prophet Isaiah, unjustly questioned by some, chiefly because not mentioned by Suidas or St. Jerome, as if they pretended to deliver an exact catalogue of all the writings of the ancients, when they so often confess there were many which they had never seen. However, this defect is abundantly supplied by the plain evident testimonies of Simon the Metaphrast, Antonius Melissa, Maximus the monk, Damascene, Oecumenius, and Tarasius patriarch of Constantinople, who all cite it as the undoubted work of our Cappadocian prelate. For his controversies none challenge more consideration than his egregii Libri, (as St. Jerome calls them, éşaíperoɩ Xóyou, as Suidas out of him,) his incomparable books against Eunomius, wherein with such a mighty force he batters down the impious assertions of that bold man. The whole consists of five books at this day, but the two last seem not to be of equal authority with the other, having no earlier testimony than the times of the Florentine council to support them; nor are they found in the most ancient manuscripts, not to mention the difference of the style. And indeed, since Eunomius's reply (which he published not till after Basil's death) consisted but of three books, it is not unreasonable to conjecture that Basil originally wrote no more. Hither also,

i Vid. Phot. Cod. CXXXVIII.

k

as being partly polemical, we may refer his book de Spiritu Sancto, which Erasmus first, and since him many, do with great clamour and confidence cry out to be corrupted and interpolated, especially in the addition of the three last chapters, but certainly without any just reason; the exceptions to it being weak and trifling, so inconsiderable, that the learned Casaubon (who, being better versed than ordinary in the rites and monuments of the ancient church, saw that the main objection from apostolical traditions would not bear the stress that was laid upon it) fairly gives up the cause. His sermons are either upon some parts of scripture, or upon particular subjects. In the first class are his nine homilies upon the Hexaemeron, or the six days' creation; a piece (says Suidas') justly to be admired, and which Nyssen affirms," ought to give place to nothing but the inspired volumes. It was early translated by Eustathius into Latin, and by him dedicated to his kinswoman Syncletica the deaconess. A translation so accurate, that Cassiodore is not afraid to say," that it has matched the elegancy of the original composition. Such also are his twenty-two homilies upon the Psalms, out of which were taken the excerpta extant in the ancient catenas, and are quite another thing from the scholia upon the Psalms, inserted into the Latin editions of this father, borrowed for the most part from St. Chrysostom and Theodoret. The prologue to these homilies St. Augustine, or some for him, translated into Latin, and clapped before his tracts upon the Psalms. And therefore, when Rivet affirms,° (and makes Fronto Ducæus vouch for him,) that this prologue is St. Augustine's, translated by somebody into Greek, and attributed to St. Basil, he is greatly out himself, and wrongs that learned Jesuit, who plainly asserts the quite contrary. Besides these, he has several single homilies upon particular subjects, both theological and moral, as de fide, baptismo, penitentia, &c. de avaritia, invidia, ebrietate, &c.; in all which he discourses finely, and admirably accommodates himself to the necessities and capacities of his hearers. In his encomiastic orations, (wherein his peculiar talent lay,) he elegantly displays the faith and patience, the courage and constancy of those who had suffered for the faith;

k Casub. exerc. xxxiii. in Baron. p. 520. xliii. p. 550.

m In Hexaem. vol. i. p. 5.

• Crit. Sac. 1. iii. c. 20.

1 In voc. Βασίλ.

n Divin. Lect. c. 1. P Not. in Psal. Basil. P. 16.

with suitable accounts of things, and proper exhortations to the imitation of their virtues; as in his oration upon the forty martyrs that suffered at Sebastea in Armenia, upon the martyrdom of Gordius, Julitta, &c. Epistles he wrote many, &v ovdèv äμeivov,a says Suidas, than which nothing can be more excellent and incomparable, and which Photius commends as the true norma and character of epistolary writing; four hundred and twenty-seven of them are still extant, (amongst which are interspersed some few from Nazianzen and Libanius,) wherein, besides the inward character of the man drawn by his own pen, we have many useful passages of those times, and thence we have extracted a good part of his life. Besides these, he has an epistolary discourse to Chilo his scholar, who had quitted the ordinary rules of the monastic institution, and turned Anchoret, wherein he gives him many excellent admonitions and rules for that state of life; a letter to a monk, and another to a devout virgin, who had committed folly together, where in a passionate strain of eloquence he represents the aggravations of their crime, and excites them to repentance. He has also three canonical epistles to Amphilochius of Iconium, at whose desire he drew up a body of rules and directions, wherein he states the nature of the crimes most usually incident to human life, and prescribes the several penances that were fit to be undergone before absolution, agreeably to the sense of the ancients, and the established canons of the church. But these three more properly belong to the last class of his works which I mentioned, viz. his canonical tracts; amongst which I place first, his ascetic rules and constitutions mentioned by St. Jerome and others, wherein, with great acuteness and elegancy, he resolves doubts and interrogatories raised out of scripture, and lays down excellent rules for those that engaged in a monastic life. It is true Sozomen tells us,$ , this work was ascribed to Eustathius bishop of Sebastea ; but then he says, it was composed by Basil, and that there were only some that reported it to have been written by Eustathius. Indeed, the unanimous suffrage of antiquity (as is plain from Jerome, Rufinus, Justinian the emperor, Photius, Suidas, &c.) constantly adjudge it to St. Basil. It consisted of old, (as Photius informs us,') of two books; the first whereof contained those short tracts de Judicio Dei, de Fide, and some others, placed

4 In voc. Βασίλ

r Cod. CXLIII.

Lib. iii. c. 14.

t Cod. CXCI.