when that was obtained there was no motive for delay. And now, for some years, Hilary disappears from sight. He tells us nothing in his writings of the ordinary course of his life and work; even his informal and discursive Homilies cast no light upon his methods of ad- ministration, his successes or failures, and very little on the character of his flock. There was no further conflict within the Church of Gaul during Hilary’s lifetime. The death of Con- stantius, which happened before Julian could meet him in battle, removed all political anxiety. Julian himself was too busy with the revival of paganism in the East to concern himself seriously with its promotion in the Latin-speaking provinces, from which he was absent, and for which he cared less. The orthodox cause in Gaul did not suffer by his apostasy. His short reign was followed by the still briefer rule of the Catholic Jovian. Next came Valentinian, personally orthodox, but steadily refusing to allow depositions on account of doctrine. Under him Arianism dwindled away; Catholic successors were elected to Arian prelates, and the process would have been hastened but by a few years had Hilary been permitted to expel Auxentius from Milan, as we shall presently see him attempting to do. This was his last interference in the politics of the Church, and does not concern us as yet. His chief interest henceforth was to be in literary work; in popularising and, as he thought, improving upon the teaching of Origen. He commented upon the book of Job, as we know from Jerome and Augustine. The former says that this, and his work on the Psalms, were translations from Origen. But that is far from an accurate account of the latter work, and may be equally inaccurate concerning the former. The two fragments which St. Augustine has preserved from the Commentary on Job are so short that we cannot draw from them any conclusion as to the character of the book. If we may trust Jerome, its length was somewhat more than a quarter of that of the Homilies on the Psalms104, in their present form. It is unfortunate, but not surprising, that the work should have fallen into oblivion. It was, no doubt, allegorical in its method, and nothing of that kind could survive in com- petition with Gregory the Great’s inimitable Moralia on Job. Hilary’s other adaptation from Origen, the Homilies on the Psalms, happily remains to us. It is at least as great a work as the De Trinitate, and one from which we can learn even more what manner of man its writer was. For the De Trinitate is an appeal to all thoughtful Christians of the time, and written for future generations as well as for them; characteristic, as it is, in many ways of the author, the compass of the work and the stateliness of its rhet- 104 Jerome, Apol. adv. Rufinum, i. 2, says that the total length of the Commentaries on Job and the Psalms was about 40,000 lines, i.e. Virgilian hexameters. The latter, at a tough estimate, must be nearly 35,000 lines in its present state. But Jerome, as we shall see, was not acquainted with so many Homilies as have come down to us; we must deduct about 5,000 lines, and this will leave l0,000 for the Commentary on Job, making it two sevenths of the length of the other. Jerome, however, is not careful in his statements of lengths; he calls the short De Synodis ‘a very long book,’ Ep. v. 2. 58 The Life and Writings of St. Hilary of Poitiers.