whether or no he entered the ministry of the Church of Poitiers, can never be known. It is only certain that he was strengthening his faith by thought and study. He had come to the Faith, St. Augustine says22, laden, like Cyprian, Lactantius and others, with the gold and silver and raiment of Egypt; and he would naturally wish to find a Christian employment for the philosophy which he brought with him. If his horizon had been limited to his neighbours in Gaul, he would have found little encouragement and less assistance. The oral teaching which prevailed in the West furnished, no doubt, safe guidance in doctrine, but could not supply reasons for the Faith. And reasons were the one great in- terest of Hilary. The whole practical side of Christianity as a system of life is ignored, or rather taken for granted and therefore not discussed, in his writings, which are ample enough to be a mirror of his thought. For instance, we cannot doubt that his belief concerning the Eucharist was that of the whole Church. Yet in the great treatise on the Trinity, of which no small part is given to the proof that Christ is God and Man, and that through this union must come the union of man with God, the Eucharist as a means to such union is only once introduced, and that in a short passage, and for the purpose of argument23. And altogether it would be as impossible to reconstruct the Christian life and thought of the day from his writings as from those of the half-pagan Arnobius. To such a mind as this the teaching which ordinary Christians needed and welcomed could bring no satisfaction, and no aid towards the interpretation of Scripture. The Western Church was, indeed, in an almost illogical po- sition. Conviction was in advance of argument. The loyal practice of the Faith had led men on, as it were by intuition, to apprehend and firmly hold truths which the more thoughtful East was doubtfully and painfully approaching. Here, again, Hilary would be out of sympathy vi with his neighbours, and we cannot wonder that in such a doctrine as that of the Holy Spirit he held the conservative Eastern view. Nor were the Latin speaking Churches well equipped with theological literature. The two24 great theologians who had as yet written in their tongue, Tertullian and Novatian, with the former of whom Hilary was familiar, were discredited by their personal history. St. Cyprian, the one doctor whom the West already boasted, could teach disciplined enthusiasm and Christian morality, but his scattered statements concerning points of doctrine convey nothing more than a general impression of piety and soundness; and even his arrangement, in the Testimonia, of Scriptural evidences was a poor weapon against the logical attack of Arianism. But there is little reason to suppose 22 De Doctr. Chr. ii. 40. 23 Trin. viii. 13–17. 24 This is on the assumption, which seems probable, that Irenæus was not yet translated from the Greek. He certainly influenced Tertullian, and through him Hilary; and his doctrine of the recapitulation of mankind in Christ, reappearing as it does in Hilary, though not in Tertullian, suggests that our writer had made an independ- ent study of Irenæus. Even if the present wretched translation existed, he would certainly read the Greek. 12 The Life and Writings of St. Hilary of Poitiers.