“St Ambrose did more than any other writer of his time to establish certain latent tendencies as characteristics of the Catholic spirit.  His pleading in favour of ascetic life and of virginity, that entirely Christian virtue, was very influential.  He lauds the virgin above the wife, and, indeed, he goes so far as to tell parents that they can obtain pardon of their sins by offering their daughters to God.  His teaching in this respect was productive of very serious rebellion against what some are pleased to term the laws of Nature.  But St Ambrose did not hesitate to uphold the repugnance of girls to marriage as not only lawful but praiseworthy.”

“I am afraid you let your thoughts dwell very much on such subjects.”

“Really, do you think I do?” John’s eyes brightened for a moment, and he lapsed into what seemed an examination of conscience.  Then he said, somewhat abruptly, “St Jerome I speak of, or rather I allude to him, and pass on at once to the study of St Augustine—­the great prose writer, as Prudentius was the great poet, of the Middle Ages.

“Now, talking of style, I will admit that the eternal apostrophising of God and the incessant quoting from the New Testament is tiresome to the last degree, and seriously prejudices the value of the ‘Confessions’ as considered from the artistic standpoint.  But when he bemoans the loss of the friend of his youth, when he tells of his resolution to embrace an ascetic life, he is nervously animated, and is as psychologically dramatic as Balzac.”

“I have taken great pains with my study of St Augustine, because in him the special genius of Christianity for the first time found a voice.  All that had gone before was a scanty flowerage—­he was the perfect fruit.  I am speaking from a purely artistic standpoint:  all that could be done for the life of the senses had been done, but heretofore the life of the soul had been lived in silence—­none had come to speak of its suffering, its uses, its tribulation.  In the time of Horace it was enough to sit in Lalage’s bower and weave roses; of the communion of souls none had ever thought.  Let us speak of the soul!  This is the great dividing line between the pagan and Christian world, and St Augustine is the great landmark.  In literature he discovered that man had a soul, and that man had grown interested in its story, had grown tired of the exquisite externality of the nymph-haunted forest and the waves where the Triton blows his plaintive blast.

“The whole theory and practice of modern literature is found in the ‘Confessions of St Augustine;’ and from hence flows the great current of psychological analysis which, with the development of the modern novel, grows daily greater in volume and more penetrating in essence....  Is not the fretful desire of the Balzac novel to tell of the soul’s anguish an obvious development of the ’Confessions’?”

“In like manner I trace the origin of the ballad, most particularly the English ballad, to Prudentius, a contemporary of Claudian.”