Remarkable indeed is the record of Gregory, Origen's pupil, who was made Bishop of Neocæsarea when there were only seventeen souls there who professed Christianity, and who when he laid down his earthly labours left only seventeen souls who were not Christians. Gregory must have been a student after Origen's own heart. He came from a highly cultured and educated class of society, and had already learnt the greatest wisdom that human intellect had to offer.

His studies of "rhetoric" and "eloquence" (as the terms were in those days) and the Latin tongue, which again led to the study of Roman Law, had so sharpened his reason that he had become wholly dissatisfied with the superstitions of current religion, and the desire for absolute Truth inclined him sympathetically towards Christianity. We have become so accustomed of late centuries to look upon a condition of faith as the only means of embracing Christianity, either faith pure and simple, or else a mind receptive to the sheer inspiration of revelation, that it is perhaps a little startling to realize that the man who comes down to us in religious history under the title of Saint Gregory, was a keen, logical, scholarly young lawyer, a man of intellectual parts, a man of a philosophical, aristocratic, and shrewd world, and that Christianity appealed to his mind and to his reason, and not necessarily to his heart or his emotions, in the first place, at all.

In the most natural way he accompanies a married sister travelling to her home in Palestine, and when in those parts, the fame of Origen's teaching at Cæsarea reaches his ears. He accidentally meets with Firmilian a Cappadocian gentleman (afterwards Bishop of Cæsarea) and finding that they have tastes in common, they agree that it would be pleasant and profitable to place themselves

under the tuition of this Christian master, and continue their education in these liberal and instructive grooves.

Their studies seem to have embraced a period of happy satisfaction. Origen appears to have led his ardent pupils through the several stages of philosophy, discipline, logic, physics, mathematics, ethics, finally metaphysics, and then as a crowning glory of all learning, and all knowledge, and all science, Christian theology. Gregory continued Origen's pupil for five years, by which time he was securely grounded in the knowledge of the Holy Scriptures as the best system of true wisdom and philosophy. It was the Science of Science. No room was left for other laws or other methods. There was obviously no separating theology from other subjects, making it apply to morality only, and leaving the development of the human intellect and physical well-being to other arts. With Origen, Christ's teachings sounded the height and depth of being, and whatever existed outside this teaching existed outside the realm of true knowledge altogether.

When Gregory left his master, he made an oration, in which he thanked him in graceful and scholarly language for the inestimable benefits of this instruction. He seemed to have been more anxious however at that particular time to express himself in theoretically correct language, than to be conscious of what the practical working of the theory was going to be. Origen followed his cherished and gifted pupil with a letter of profoundly spiritual tone, accentuating the fact that he had taught him only those sciences and parts of philosophy which might be useful to the Christian religion, and for understanding and explaining the Holy Scriptures, advising him above all things deeply and diligently to study these Scriptures, and not only to seek but to knock, to pray with faith

and fervency, it being in vain to think that the door should be opened where prayer is not sent beforehand to unlock it.

Upon Gregory's return to his native metropolis, Neocæsarea, all eyes were upon him. The wise and great men of the city besought him to reside among them and let them reap the fruits of his studies. This had the immediate effect of driving him out into the wilderness. Swiftly the conviction had come to him that what he had learned was not a mere academic accomplishment. He was like a man who having worked upon the building of a vessel in dry dock, for the first time beholds it launched in finished beauty and majesty upon the surging billows of the open sea, and feels the strange, onerous thrill, and lonely glory of impending voyages.

With Gregory, the desert spaces were soon to be exchanged for the sea of humanity, for the concourse of multitudes of ignorant, sinful, suffering men and women to whom the true laws of life must be explained. When? Where? Must it be soon? He longed to flee from an idolatrous world and to remain in peaceful contemplation of God, to watch His handiwork in the many expressions of natural beauty around him, in that which Wordsworth has described as

"a sense sublime

Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit that impels

All thinking things, all objects of all thought
And rolls through all things."

He was not long allowed to remain in solitude. Phædimus, bishop of Amasea, a neighbouring province, did his best to find out Gregory's retreat, and when the latter fled still further beyond reach, Phædimus was led by the Spirit to appoint Gregory Bishop of that place, although there was as yet no existing church, and he had not been able to speak with him upon so important a charge face to face.

Gregory then felt impelled to take up the sacred work of preaching Christ, and he no sooner returned from the wilderness than the power of the truth made itself felt insomuch that the oracles of the Gentile priests, accustomed to other concepts of God, became dumb.

This so-called miraculous power caused so much excitement and commotion that the whole city of Neocæsarea was anxious both to see and hear him. He was received with the greatest consideration and lodged with one Musonius, a person of great honour and power in the city. What followed we cite from the narrative given in Dr Cave's Lives of the Fathers:

"It was no little abatement to the good man's (Gregory) joy, to think in what a profane and idolatrous place his lot was fallen, and that therefore it concerned him to lose no time. Accordingly that very day, he fell to preaching, and with so good success, that before night he had converted a little Church. Early the next morning the doors were crowded, persons of all ranks, ages, infirmities, and distempers flocking to him, upon whom he wrought two cures at once, healing both soul and body, instructing their minds, convincing their errors, reclaiming and reforming their manners, and that with ease; because at the same time strengthening the infirm, curing the sick, healing the diseased, banishing demons out of the possessed; men