at it, or expresseth a delightful complacence therein; as he is a partner in the fact, so he is a sharer in the guilt.  There are not only slanderous throats, but slanderous ears also; not only wicked inventions, which engender and brood lies, but wicked assents, which hatch and foster them.  Not only the spiteful mother that conceiveth such spurious brats, but the midwife that helpeth to bring them forth, the nurse that feedeth them, the guardian that traineth them up to maturity, and setteth them forth to live in the world; as they do really contribute to their subsistence, so deservedly they partake in the blame due to them, and must be responsible for the mischief they do.

BASIL THE GREAT (329-379)

Basil the Great, born at Caesarea in Cappadocia A. D. 329, was one of the leading orators of the Christian Church in the fourth century.  He was a friend of the famous Gregory of Nazianzus, and Gregory of Nyssa was his brother.

The spirit of his time was one of change.  The foundations of the Roman world were undermined.  The old classical civilization of beauty and order had reached its climax and reacted on itself; the Greek worship of the graceful; the Roman love of the regular, the strong, the martial, the magnificent, had failed to save the world from a degradation which, under the degeneracy of the later Caesars, had become indescribable.  The early Christians, filled with a profound conviction of the infernal origin of the corruption of the decaying civilization they saw around them, were moved by such a compelling desire to escape it as later times can never realize and hardly imagine.  Moved by this spirit, the earnest young men of the time, educated as Basil was in the philosophy, the poetry, and the science of the classical times, still felt that having this they would lose everything unless they could escape the influences of the world around them.  They did not clearly discriminate between what was within and without themselves.  It was not clear to them whether the corruption of an effete civilization was not the necessary corruption of all human nature including their own.  This doubt sent men like Basil to the desert to attempt, by fasting and scourging, to get such mastery over their bodies as to compel every rebellious nerve and stubborn muscle to yield instant obedience to their aspirations after a more than human perfection.  If they never attained their ideal; if we find them coming out of the desert, as they sometimes did, to engage in controversies, often fierce and unsaintly enough, we can see, nevertheless, how the deep emotions of their struggle after a higher life made them the great orators they were.  Their language came from profound depths of feeling.  Often their very earnestness betrays them into what for later ages is unintelligibility.  Only antiquarians now can understand how deeply the minds of the earlier centuries of the New Order, which saved progress from