So passed away a leader of men in whose case the epithet ‘great’ is no conventional compliment.  He shared with his illustrious brother primate of Alexandria the honour of rallying the Catholic forces in the darkest days of the Arian depression.  He was great as foremost champion of a great cause, great in contemporary and posthumous influence, great in industry and self-denial, great as a literary controversialist.  The estimate formed of him by his contemporaries is expressed in the generous, if somewhat turgid, eloquence of the laudatory oration of the slighted Gregory of Nazianzus.  Yet nothing in Gregory’s eulogy goes beyond the expressions of the prelate who has seemed to some to be “the wisest and holiest man in the East in the succeeding century.” Kingsley, Hypatia, chap. xxx.  Basil is described by the saintly and learned Theodoret cf. Gibbon, chap. xxi. in terms that might seem exaggerated when applied to any but his master, as the light not of Cappadocia only, but of the world. Theod., H.E. iv. 16, and Ep. cxlvi.  To Sophronius Apud Photium Cod. 231. he is the “glory of the Church.”  To Isidore of Pelusium, Ep. lxi. he seems to speak as one inspired.  To the Council of Chalcedon he is emphatically a minister of grace; cf. Ceillier, vi. 8, 1. to the second council of Nicæa a layer of the foundations of orthodoxy. Ib.  His death lacks the splendid triumph of the martyrdoms of Polycarp and Cyprian.  His life lacks the vivid incidents which make the adventures of Athanasius an enthralling romance.  He does not attract the sympathy evoked by the unsophisticated simplicity of Gregory his friend or of Gregory his brother.  There does not linger about his memory the close personal interest that binds humanity to Augustine, or the winning loyalty and tenderness that charm far off centuries into affection for Theodoret.  Sometimes he seems a hard, almost a sour man. cf. Ep. xxv.  Sometimes there is a jarring reminder of his jealousy for his own dignity. cf. xcviii.  Evidently he was not a man who could be thwarted without a rupture of pleasant relations, or slighted with impunity.  In any subordinate position he was not easy to get on with. e.g. his relations with his predecessor.  But a man of strong will, convicted that he is championing a righteous cause, will not hesitate to sacrifice, among other things, the amenities that come of amiable absence of self-assertion.  To Basil, to assert himself was to assert the truth of Christ and of His Church.  And in the main the identification was a true one.  Basil was human, and occasionally, as in the famous dispute with Anthimus, so disastrously fatal to the typical friendship of the earlier manhood, he may have failed to perceive that the Catholic cause would not suffer from the existence of two metropolitans in Cappadocia.  But the great archbishop could be an affectionate friend, thirsty for sympathy. Ep. xci.  And he was right in his estimate of his position.  Broadly speaking, Basil, more powerfully than any contemporary official, worker, or writer in the Church, did represent and defend through all the populous provinces of the empire which stretched from the Balkans to the Mediterranean, from the Ægean to the Euphrates, the cause whose failure or success has been discerned, even by thinkers of no favourable predisposition, to have meant death or life to the Church. e.g. T. Carlyle.  “He perceived Christianity itself to have been at stake.  If the Arians had won, it would have dwindled away into a legend.”  J. A. Froude, Life of Carlyle in London, ii. 462.  St. Basil is duly canonized in the grateful memory, no less than in the official bead-roll, of Christendom, and we may be permitted to regret that the existing Kalendar of the Anglican liturgy has not found room for so illustrious a Doctor in its somewhat niggard list. In the Greek Kalendar January 1, the day of the death, is observed in honour of the saint.  In the West St. Basil’s day is June 14, the traditional date of the consecration.  The martyrologies of Jerome and Bede do not contain the name.  The first mention is ascribed by the Bollandists to Usuard.  (Usuard’s martyrology was composed for Charles the Bold at Paris.)  In the tenth century a third day was consecrated in the East to the common commemoration of SS. Basil, Gregory of Nazianzus, and John Chrysostom.  For the omission some amends have lately 1894. been made in the erection of a statue of the great archbishop of Cæsarea under the dome of the Cathedral St. Paul in London. Basil lived at the period when the relics of martyrs and saints were beginning to be collected and honoured.  (e.g. Ep. cxcvii.)  To Damasus, the bishop of Rome, whose active sympathy he vainly strove to win, is mainly due the reverent rearrangement of the Roman catacombs.  (Roma Sotteranea, Northcote and Brownlow, p. 97.)  It was not to be expected that Basil’s own remains should be allowed to rest in peace; but the gap between the burial at Cæsarea and the earliest record of their supposed reappearance is wide.  There was a Church of St. Basil at Bruges founded in 1187, which was believed to possess some of the archbishop’s bones.  These were solemnly translated in 1463 to the Church of St. Donatian, which disappeared at the time of the French revolution.  Pancirola (d. 1599) mentions a head, an arm, and a rib, said to be Basil’s, among the treasures of Rome.