SECULAR CONTEST BETWEEN CONSCIENCE AND POWER. 129 



In the year of our Lord 390 the great city of Thessalonica waa 

 convulsed by a seditious insurrection, in the course of which the 

 imperial general and several of his principal ofQcers were in- 

 humanly murdered by the populace. The occasion of the insur- 

 rection only aggravated its guilt. 



Theodosius the Great was reigning at the time and, being of a 

 somewhat impulsive and fiery temper, ordered his barbarian 

 auxiliaries to massacre the inhabitants, with the result that at least 

 7,000 were slain. When the great Ambrose, then Archbishop of 

 Milan, the imperial seat of government, heard of this he retired 

 into the country grief-stricken and addressed a private letter to the 

 emperor, pointing out the seriousness of his crime and suggesting 

 that he should confine himself to prayer and should not presume 

 to receive the holy eucharist with hands that were still polluted 

 with innocent blood. Though many of his predecessors had pro- 

 fessed Christianity, Theodosius was the first emperor who gave 

 any certain signs of true conversion, and in private he deeply 

 bewailed the sin of which he had been guilty. When, however, 

 Sunday came round he presented himself, as in former times, at 

 the great Cathedral of Milan to take the communion. Ambrose 

 stopped him in the porch, declaring that more was needed than 

 private repentance for such a public sin as that which he had 

 committed. Theodosius ventured to suggest that if he had been 

 guilty of murder, David, the man after God's own heart, had 

 committed not only murder, but adultery. To this Ambrose 

 replied: You have imitated David in his crime, imitate then 

 his repentance," and for eight months the monarch of the Eoman 

 world was debarred from the sacrament and appeared in the 

 Cathedral as a penitent for his sin. 



This scene represents perhaps the greatest triumph of con- 

 science over supreme power. Never in the past had a monarch 

 been publicly debarred of religious privileges on account of per- 

 sonal guilt ; and if we recall the Third Napoleon partaking of the 

 sacram^ent in the Cathedral of Notre Dame after he had broken his 

 oath to the French Eepublic and usurped imperial power, imprison- 

 ing and massacring his opponents, as so eloquently described by 

 Kinglake in his history of the Crimean War, we must admit that 

 the moral force of conscience is not as great in our times as it 

 was in the period, which some of us are pleased to refer to as the 

 Dark Ages. 



It is interesting to note that Theodosius was the last universal 

 ruler of the civilized world, for the empire was divided on his 

 death between his two sons and never reunited, nor has any sole 

 world-ruler since appeared. 



It was no longer a case of conscience energising feeble men to 

 resist the world power unto blood, but of conscience compelling 

 that world power to obey its behests. No one can deny that 



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