counsellor in the holy bishop Hilary, from whom he received the minor orders. After braving toil and peril by land and sea in a journey to his native country for the conversion of his family, he returned to a life of seclusion in Gaul, and acquired such a reputation for holiness that on the death of Lidorius in 371 the people of Tours, in spite of his strenuous resistance, actually forced him to become their bishop.[411] From that moment Tours became a mission-centre whence the light of the faith spread with marvellous rapidity over all the surrounding country. Anjou and all the neighbouring lands owed their conversion to S. Martin and the missionaries sent out by him; everywhere paganism gave way before his eloquent preaching, his dauntless courage, his almost apostolic endowments--above all, perhaps, his good example. He was looked upon as the Thaumaturgus of Gaul, and countless legends were told of his wonder-working powers; more famous than all of them is a story of the saint in his soldier-days, when, Christian already in feeling though not yet in profession, he stopped his horse one cold winter’s night, drew his sword and cut his military cloak in halves to share it with one whose necessity was greater than his own. That night he dreamed that the Lord whom, not knowing, he yet instinctively served, appeared to him wearing the half cloak which he had thus given away; and it was this vision which determined him to receive baptism.[412] Amid all his busy, active life he never lost the love of solitary contemplation so characteristic of the early Christian missionaries. His episcopal city lay on the south side of the Loire, but had on the north or right bank a large suburb afterwards known by the name of S. Symphorian; beyond this, farther to the eastward, the bishop found for himself a “green retreat,” which has scarcely yet lost its air of peaceful loneliness, and which, before the suburb had spread to its present extent, must have been an ideal spot for monastic retirement. A little wooden cell with its back against the white limestone rock which shelters the northern side of the basin of Tours--an expanse of green solitude in front, stretching down to the broad calm river--such was the nest which S. Martin built him in the wilderness; gathering round him a little band of men likeminded with himself, he snatched every spare moment from his episcopal cares to flee away thither and be at rest;[413] and the rock-hewn cells of the brotherhood became the nucleus of a famous abbey, the “Great Monastery,” as it was emphatically called--_Majus Monasterium_, Marmoutier. Another minster, of almost greater fame, grew up over the saint’s burial place outside the western wall of the city, on low-lying ground which, before it was reclaimed by the energetic dyke-makers of the ninth and tenth centuries, must have been not unfrequently under water. It is within the episcopal city of S. Martin, in the writings