St. Basil, called the Great, was born at Cesarea in Cappadocia, in the year 328. He was one of a family of saints. His father St. Basil, his mother St. Emmelie, his two brothers St. Gregory of Nyssa and St. Peter of Sebaste, and his sister St. Macrina, were all distinguished for their sanctity, and renowned in the Greek calendar. The St. Basil who takes rank as the second luminary of the Eastern Church, and whose dogmatical and theological works influenced the faith of his own age, and consequently of ours, was the greatest of all. But, notwithstanding his importance in the Greek Church, he figures so seldom in the productions of Western Art, that I shall content myself with relating just so much of his life and actions as may render the few representations of him interesting and intelligible. He owed his first education to his grandmother St. Macrina the elder, a woman of singular capacity and attainments, to whom he has in various parts of his works acknowledged his obligations. For several years he pursued his studies in profane learning, philosophy, law, and eloquence, at Constantinople, and afterwards at Athens, where he had two companions and fellow-students of very opposite character: Gregory of Nazianzen, afterwards the _Saint_; and Julian, afterwards the _Apostate_. The success of the youthful Basil in all his studies, and the reputation he had obtained as an eloquent pleader, for a time swelled his heart with vanity, and would have endangered his salvation but for the influence of his sister, St. Macrina, who in this emergency preserved him from himself, and elevated his mind to far higher aims than those of mere worldly science and worldly distinction. From that period, and he was then not more than twenty-eight, Basil turned his thoughts solely to the edification of the Christian Church; but first he spent some years in retreat among the hermits of the desert, as was the fashion of that day, living, as they did, in abstinence, poverty, and abstracted study; acknowledging neither country, family, home, nor friends, nor fortune, nor worldly interests of any kind, but with his thoughts fixed solely on eternal life in another world. In these austerities he, as was also usual, consumed and ruined his bodily health; and remained to the end of his life a feeble wretched invalid,—a circumstance which was supposed to contribute greatly to his sanctity. He was ordained priest in 362, and bishop of Cesarea in 370; his ordination on the 14th of June being kept as one of the great feasts of the Eastern Church.