But, when we come to the examination of these hymns in detail, the gravest doubts arise. The first three were discovered in the same manuscript to which we owe the De Mysteriis. They formed part of a small collection, which cannot have numbered more than seven or eight hymns, of which these three only have escaped, not without some mutilation. That which stands first is the confession of faith, the matter of which contains nothing that is inconsistent with Hilary’s time. But beyond this, and the fact that the manuscript ascribes it to Hilary, there is nothing to suggest his authorship. It is a dreary production in a limping imitation of an Horatian metre; an involved argumentative statement of Catholic doctrine, in which it would be difficult to say whether verse or subject suffers the more from their unwanted union. The sequence of thought is helped out by the mechanical device of an alphabetical arrangement of the stanzas, but even this assistance could not make it intelligible to an ordinary congregation Two of the simplest stanzas are as follows:— Extra quam caper potest mens humana manet Filius in Patre, rursus quem penes sit Pater dignus, qui genitus est Filius in Deum. Felix quid potuit fide res tantas penitus credulus assequi, ut incorporeo ex Deo profectus fuerit primogenitus Dei. It is written in stanzas of six lines in the ms.; the metre is the second Asclepiad. Gamurrini, the discoverer, and Fechtrup (in Wetzer-Welte’s Encyclopædia) regard it as the work of Hilary, but the weight of opinion is against them.. And the want of literary skill in the author makes it impossible to suppose that Hilary is he; classical knowledge was still on too high a level for an educated man to perpetrate such solecisms.