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test. She was extremely affected by meditating on our Saviour's passion, which she had always present to her mind. At mass she was so absorpt in God as to seem immoveable, especially after holy communion: she often fell into extasies of love and devotion. She was particularly devout to St John the Evangelist, and above all to our Lady, under whose singular protection she put her Order. Going out to see her son John Baptist, who was dangerously sick, she fell so ill herself that she could not return to her monastery at night. After having foretold her death, and received the sacraments, she expired on the ninth of March, in the year 1440, and of her age the fifty-sixth. God attested her sanctity by miracles: she was honoured among the saints immediately after her death, and solemnly canonized by Paul V. in 1608. Her shrine in Rome is most magnificent and rich: and her festival is kept as a holyday in the city, with great solemnity. The Oblates make no solemn vows, only a promise of obedience to the mother-president, enjoy pensions, inherit estates, and go abroad with leave. Their abbey in Rome is filled with ladies of the first rank.

In a religious life, in which a regular distribution of holy employments and duties take up the whole day, and leave no interstices of time for idleness, sloth, or the world, hours pass in these exercises with the rapidity of moments, and moments, by fervour of the desires, bear the value of years. There is not an instant in which a soul is not employed for God, and studies not with her whole heart to please him. Every step, every thought and desire, is a sacrifice of fidelity, obedience, and love offered to him. Even meals, recreation, and rest, are sanctified by this intention; and from the religious vows and habitual purpose of the soul, of consecrating herself entirely to God, in time and eternity, every action, as St Thomas teaches, renews and contains the fervour and merit of this entire consecration, of which it is a part. In a secular life, a person, by regularity in the employment of his time, and fervour in devoting himself to God in all his actions and designs, may in some degree enjoy the same happiness and advantage. This St Frances perfectly practised, even before she renounced the world. She lived 40 years with her husband, without ever giv

ing him the least occasion of offence; and by the fervour with which she conversed in heaven, she seemed already to have quitted the earth, and to have made paradise her ordinary dwelling.

ON THE SAME DAY.

St GREGORY of Nyssa, B. C. He was younger brother to St Basil the Great; was educated in polite and sacred studies, and married to a virtuous lady. He afterwards renounced the world, and was ordained Tector; but was overcome, by his violent passion for eloquence, to teach rhetoric. St Gregory Nazianzen wrote to him in the strongest terms, exhorting him to renounce that paltry or ignoble glory, as he elegantly calls it(1). This letter produced its desired effect. St Gregory returned to the sacred ministry in the lower functions of the altar : after some time he was called by his brother Basil to assist him in his pastoral duties, and in 372 was chosen bishop of Nyssa, a city of Cappadocia, near the Lesser Armenia. The Arians, who trembled at his name, prevailed with. Demosthenes, vicar or deputy governor of the province, to banish him. Upon the death of the Arian emperor Valens, in 378, St Gregory was restored to his see by the emperor Gratian. Our holy prelate was chosen by his colleagues to redress the abuses and dissentions which heresy had introduced in Arabia and Palestine. He assisted at the council of Constantinople in 381, and was always regarded as the centre of the catholic communion in the East. Those prelates only who joined themselves to him, were looked upon as orthodox. He died about the year 400, probably on the tenth of January, on which the Greeks have always kept his festival: The Latins honour his memory on the ninth of March. The high reputation of his learning and virtue procured him the title of Father of the Fathers, as the seventh general council testifies. His sermons are the monuments of his piety; but his great penetration and learning appear more in his polemic works, especially in his twelve books against Eunomius. See his life collected from his works, St Greg. Nazianzen, Socrates, and Theodoret, by Hermant; Tillemont, T. 9. p. 561, Ceillier, T. 8. p. 200. Dr Cave imagines, that St.

(1) ἀδόξην ἐνδοξίαν, Naz. ep. 43.

Gregory continued to cohabit with his wife after he was bishop. But St Jerom testifies that the custom of the eastern churches did not suffer such a thing. She seems to have lived to see him bishop, and to have died about the year 384; but she professed a state of continency: hence St Gregory Nazianzen, in his short eulogium of her, says, she rivalled her brothers-in-law who were in the priesthood, and calls her sacred, or one consecrated to God; probably she was a deaconess.

Appendix on the Writings of St GREGORY of Nyssa.

ST GREGORY of Nyssa wrote many learned works extant in three volumes in folio, published by the learned Jesuit Fronto le Duc, at Paris, An. 1615. and 1638. They are eternal monuments of this father's great zeal, piety, and eloquence. Photius commends his diction, as surpassing that of all other rhetoricians, in perspicuity, elegance, and a pleasing turn of expression, and says, that in the beauty and sweetness of his eloquence, and the copiousness of his arguments in his polemic works against Eunomius, he far outwent the rest who handled the same subjects. He wrote many commentaries on holy Scripture. The first is his Hexaemeron, or book on the six days work of the creation of the world. It is a supplement to his brother St Basil's work on the same subject, who had omitted the obscurer questions above the reach of the vulgar to whom he preached. St Gregory filled up that deficiency, at the request of many learned men, with an accuracy that became the brother of the great St Basil. He shews in this work a great knowledge of philosophy. He finishes it by saying, The widow that offered her two mites, did not hinder the magnificent presents of the rich, nor did they who offered skins, wood, and goats-hair, towards the tabernacle, hinder those who could give gold, silver, and precious stones." I shall be happy," says he, "if "I can present hairs; and shall rejoice to see others add ornaments "of purple, or gold tissue." His book On the workmanship of man, may be looked upon as a continuation of the former, though it was wrote first. He shews it was suitable that man, being made to command in quality of king all this lower creation, should find his palace already adorned, and that other things should be created, before he appeared who was to be the spectator of the miracles of the Omnipotent. His frame is so admirable, his nature so excellent, that the whole Blessed Trinity proceeds as it were by a council to his formation. He is a king, by his superiority and command over all other creatures by his gift of reason; is part spiritual, by which he can unite himself to God; part material, by which he has it in his to use, and even enslave himself to creatures. Virtue is his purple garment, immortality his sceptre, and eternal glory his crown. His resemblance to his Creator consists in the soul only, that is, in its moral virtues, and God's grace; which divine resemblance men most basely VOL. III.

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efface in themselves by sin. He speaks of the dignity and spiritual nature of the soul, and of the future resurrection of the body, and concludes with an anatomical description of it, which shews him to have been well skilled in medicine, and in that branch of natural philosophy, for that age. The two homilies on the words, Let us make man, are falsely ascribed to him. Being desired by one Cæsarius, to prescribe him rules of a perfect virtue, he did this by his Life of Moses, the pattern of virtue. He closes it with this lesson, that perfection consists not in avoiding sin for fear of torments, as slaves do, nor for the hope of recompence, as mercenaries do; but in "fearing, as the only thing to be dreaded, to lose the friendship of God; and in having only one desire, viz. of God's friendship, in which alone man's spiritual life consists. This is to be obtained by fixing the mind only on divine and heavenly things." We have next his two treatises On the Inscriptions of the Psalms, and An exposition of the sixth Psalm, full of allegorical and moral instructions. In the first of these, extolling the divine sentiments and instructions of those holy prayers, he says, that all Christians learned them, and thought that time lost in which they had them not in their mouths: even little children, and old men, sung them; all in affliction found them their comfort sent by God: those who travelled by land or sea, those who were employed in sedentary trades; and the faithful of all ages, sexes, and conditions, sick and well, made the Psalms their occupation. These divine canticles were sung by them in all times of joy, in marriages and festivals; by day, and in the night vigils, &c. His eight homilies On the three first Chapters of Ecclesiastes, are an excellent moral instruction and literal explication of that book. He addressed his fifteen homilies On the Book of Canticles, which he had preached to his flock, to Olympias, a lady of Constantinople, who, after 20 months marriage, being left a widow, distributed a great estate to the church and poor, a great part by the hands of our saint, whom she had settled an acquaintance with in a journey he had made to the imperial city. St Gregory extols the excellency of that divine book, not to be read but by pure hearts, disengaged from all love of creatures, and free from all corporeal images. He says the Holy Ghost instructs us by degrees by the book of Proverbs to avoid sin; by Ecclesiastes to draw our affections from creatures; by this of Canticles, he teaches perfection, which is pure charity. He explains it mystically. He has five orations On the Lord's Prayer. In the first, he elegantly shews the universal, indispensible necessity of prayer, which alone unites the heart to God, and preserves it from the approach of sin. Every breath we draw, ought also to be accompanied with thanksgiving, as it brings us innumerable benefits from God, which we ought continually to acknowledge. But we must only pray for spiritual, not temporal things. In the second, he shews that none can justly call God father, who remain in sin, without desires of repentance, and who consequently bear the ensigns of the devil. Resemblance with God, is the mark of being his son; that title farther obliges. us to have our minds and hearts always in heaven. By the text we pray that God alone may reign in us, and his will be ever done by us; and that the devil, or self-love, never have any share

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in our hearts and actions. By the fourth we ask bread, i. e. absolute necessaries, not dainties, not riches, or any thing superfluous, or for the world, and even bread only for to-day, without solicitude for to-morrow, which perhaps will never come: all irregular desires, and all occasions of them, must be excluded. The serpent is

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watching at your heel, but do you watch his head: give him no "admittance into your mind: from the least entrance he will draw "in after him the foldings of his whole body. If Eve's counsellor persuades you that any thing looks beautiful and tastes sweet, if you listen, you are soon drawn into gluttony, and lust, and avarice, "&c." The fifth petition he thus paraphrases, "I have forgiven my debtors, do not reject your suppliant. I dismissed my debtor "chearful and free: I am your debtor, send me not away sorrowful. "May my dispositions, my sentence prevail with you. I have par"doned; pardon. I have shewed compassion; imitate your ser

"vant's mercy. My offences are indeed far more grievous; but

"consider how much you excel in all good. It is just that you ma"nifest to sinners a mercy suiting your infinite greatness. I have given proof of mercy in little things, according to the capacity of my nature; but your bounty is not to be confined by the narrowness of my power," &c. His eight sermons, On the eight Beati tudes, are wrote in the same style. What he says in them on the motives of humility, which he thinks is meant by the first beatitude, of poverty of spirit, and on meekness, proves how much his heart was filled with those divine virtues.

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Besides what we have of St Gregory on the holy scripture, time has preserved us many other works of piety of this father. His discourse entitled On his Ordination, ought to be called On the Dedica tion. It was spoke by him in the consecration of a magnificent church, built by Rufin (præfect of the Prætorium) in 394, at the borough of the Oak, near Chalcedon. His sermon, On loving the Poor, is a pathetic exhortation to alms, from the last sentence on the wicked for a neglect of that duty. "At which threat (says he) I am most vehemently terrified and disturbed in mind." He excites to compassion for the lepers in particular, who under their miseries are our bre thren, and it is only God s favour that has preserved us sound rather than them; and who knows what we ourselves may become? His dialogue Against Fate, was a disputation with a Heathen philosopher, who maintained a destiny or overruling fate in all things. His canonical epistle To Letoits, bishop of Melitine, metropolis of Armenia, has a place among the canons of penance in the Greek church, published by Beveridge. He condemns apostacy to perpetual penance, deprived of the sacraments till the article of death: if only extorted by torments, for nine years; the same law for witcheraft; nine years for simple fornication; eighteen for adultery; twenty seven for murder, or for rapine. But he permits the terms to be abridged in cases of extraordinary fervour. Simple theft he orders to be expiated by the sinner giving all his substance to the poor; if he has none, to work to relieve them.

His discourse against those who defer baptism, is an invitation to sinners to penance, and chiefly of catechumens to baptism, death be