post outside the Church, let him hear the voice of the people at their prayers, let him mark the multitudinous sound of our hymns, and in the performance of the divine Sacraments let him recognise the responses which our loyal confession makes. Every adversary must needs be affrighted, the devil routed, death conquered in the faith of the Resurrection, by such jubilant utterance of our exultant voice. The enemy will know that this gives pleasure to God and assurance to our hope, even this public and triumphant raising of our voice in song.’ Original composition, both of words and music, is evidently in Hilary’s mind; and we can see that he is rather recommending a useful novelty than describing an established practice. It is a remarkable coincidence that the five hymns which are called his are, in fact, a song of triumph over the devil, and a hymn in praise of the Resurrection, which are, so their editor thinks, actually alluded to in the Homily cited above; a confession of faith; and a morning hymn and one which has been taken for an evening hymn. These are exactly the subjects which correspond to Hilary’s description. 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 Mys- teriis. 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 al- phabetical arrangement of the stanzas, but even this assistance could not make it intelligible to an ordinary congregation134. And the want of literary skill in the author makes it im- possible to suppose that Hilary is he; classical knowledge was still on too high a level for an educated man to perpetrate such solecisms. In the same manuscript there follow, after an unfortunate gap, the two hymns to which it has been suggested that Hilary alludes in his Homily on Psalm 65, those which celebrate the praises of the Resurrection and the triumph over Satan. The former is by a woman’s hand, and the feminine forms of the language must have made it, one would think, unsuitable for congregational singing. There is no reason why the poem should not date from the fourth 134 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 Encyc- lopædia) regard it as the work of Hilary, but the weight of opinion is against them. 68 The Life and Writings of St. Hilary of Poitiers.