them in an indiscriminate slaughter. Hereupon Ambrose, who had endeavoured in advance to
restrain the Emperor, but in vain, wrote him a letter full of splendid courage, on a purely moral
issue, involving, for once, no question of theology or the power of the Church:
"There was that done in the city of the Thessalonians of which no similar record exists, which I
was not able to prevent happening; which, indeed, I had before said would be most atrocious
when I so often petitioned against it."
David repeatedly sinned, and confessed his sin with penitence. * Will Theodosius do likewise?
Ambrose decides that "I dare not offer the sacrifice if you intend to be present. Is that which is
not allowed after shedding the blood of one innocent person, allowed after shedding the blood
of many? I do not think so."
The Emperor repented, and, divested of the purple, did public penance in the cathedral of
Milan. From that time until his death in 395, he had no friction with Ambrose.
Ambrose, while he was eminent as a statesman, was, in other respects, merely typical of his age.
He wrote, like other ecclesiastical authors, a treatise in praise of virginity, and another
deprecating the remarriage of widows. When he had decided on the site for his new cathedral,
two skeletons (revealed in a vision, it was said) were conveniently discovered on the spot, were
found to work miracles, and were declared by him to be those of two martyrs. Other miracles
are related in his letters, with all the credulity characteristic of his times. He was inferior to
Jerome as a scholar, and to Augustine as a philosopher. But as a statesman, who skilfully and
courageously consolidated the power of the Church, he stands out as a man of the first rank.
Jerome is chiefly notable as the translator who produced the Vulgate, which remains to this day
the official Catholic version of the Bible. Until his day the Western Church relied, as regards
the Old Testament, chiefly on translations from the Septuagint, which, in important ways
differed from the Hebrew original. Christians were given to maintaining that the Jews, since the
rise of Christianity, had falsified the Hebrew text where it seemed to predict the Messiah. This
was a view which sound scholarship showed to be untenable,
* This allusion to the Books of Samuel begins a line of biblical argument against kings
which persisted throughout the Middle Ages, and even in the, conflict of the Puritans with
the Stuarts. It appears for instance in Milton.