One of the points which stagger modern Christians about St. Ambrose and St. Augustine is their enthusiastic and apparently genuine belief in saints' relics. When St. Ambrose was asked to consecrate a new church, and he consented on condition that he should have some new relics to place therein, the relics were soon forthcoming. He professed that he was told in a dream where the relics of Gervasius and another saint were buried. The bodies were afterwards found in the spot indicated and placed in the new church. Ambrose delivered impassioned and fanciful harangues during the proceedings, claiming for these relics that they had expelled demons and restored sight to a blind butcher named Severus, who merely touched them. Mosheim, Gibbon, and Isaac Taylor treat all this as a mere trick or imposture. But others are not prepared to come to any decision, as next to nothing is known as to the circumstances under which all these events or apparent events happened. The expelling of demons may be explained by some hysterical excitement; and the blindness may have been something more or less temporary. Ambrose, however, apparently had the most unfeigned belief in the miracles, and he related the whole story to his sister Marcellina in a letter which does not savour of knavery. St. Augustine, at a later date, also related similar miracles worked by the same relics, which he vouches to be true. ST. JEROME'S LIFE OF PAUL, THE FIRST HERMIT (A.D. 400). St. Jerome, in his Life of Paul, the first hermit, says that Paul, when a boy, suspecting his life to be in danger, fled to the wilderness, and found a convenient great cave in which to live. "In this beloved dwelling," says Jerome, "offered him as it were by God, Paul spent all his life in prayer and solitude, while the palm tree gave him food and clothes; as to which, lest it should seem impossible to some, I call Jesus and His holy angels to witness that I have seen monks, one of whom, shut up for thirty years, lived on barley bread and muddy water; another, in an old cistern, which in the country speech they call the Syrian's bed, was kept alive on five figs each day. These things therefore will seem incredible to those who do not believe, for to those who do believe all things are possible." St. Paul the hermit, in his one hundred and thirteenth year, was visited by Antony, who was ninety, Paul being in a dying state in a sequestered cell. Antony was sent on a message, and on his return Paul was found on his knees with hands uplifted as if in prayer, but was quite dead. Antony, according to previous instructions, wished to bury the saint, but had no spade, and sat down to consider how he was to proceed. Forthwith, as Jerome relates, two lions came running from the desert tossing their manes, fearless and innocent as doves. They went straight to the corpse, crouched, wagged their tails and roared, and then began to claw the ground and dig a deep place, large enough to hold a man.