How constantly the Church Fathers strove to check the rhetorical tendency in themselves and in the clergy may be seen from their frequent protests. Jerome remarked reprovingly of Hilary of Poitiers that he was affected by the tragic and turgid vein in the Gallic character, and too much adorned with the ‘flowers of Greece’, so that his long periods were not understood by the simple friars.[969] And Vincent of Lérins had to warn that a priest’s language must be ‘disciplined and grave’.[970] ‘Docente te in ecclesia’, said Jerome elsewhere,[971] ‘non clamor populi sed gemitus suscitetur.’ Gallus, in Sulpicius Severus,[972] expresses his contempt for flowery language. ‘For if you call me a disciple of Martin (the stern saint of Tours) you must also allow me the right of following him in despising vain ornamental speech and verbal embellishment’ (_sermonum faleras et verborum ornamenta_). In a sermon on Rebecca, attributed to Caesarius,[973] the preacher proclaims the principle of adaptability: ‘The educated must accommodate themselves to the ignorance of the simple. If, in expounding holy Scripture we desired the arrangement and the eloquence of (certain) holy fathers, ... the food of doctrine could reach only a small band of scholars (there is a secret satisfaction in having had a superior training), while the remaining masses of the people would go unfed. And therefore I humbly ask that the ears of the learned bear patiently the words of simplicity (_rustica verba_) if only the whole flock of God may partake of spiritual food by means of speech unadorned and (if I may say so) pedestrian.’ Ruricius, Bishop of Limoges, and a contemporary of Sidonius,[974] speaks of his ‘ineptia rusticitatis’,[975] his ‘rusticus sermo’.[976] ‘Rusticitatem meam’, he says, ‘malo prodere quam perdere caritatem’.[977] This prevalent cultivation of ‘rusticitas’ was, as has been said, partly a reaction, and like all reactions it had a tendency to go too far. It is not surprising to find men like Jerome protesting (though with self-condemnation) against the bald style of certain Christian writings.[978] Heyne, after describing the ‘verborum fucos, concinnos et calamistrum’ of the rhetoricians, remarks on the uncultured and disgusting lack of style into which the later writers fell. It was natural, he says, that, having thrown eloquence overboard, they should fall into ‘barbaries’ and subjects vulgar and essentially trivial (_per se tenuia_). The charge of ‘barbaries’ is admitted. But the subject-matter was not always ‘per se tenuia’; it was essentially the reverse: and the ‘horrida oratio’ into which the Christian writers fell had the compensation of sincerity and the capacity of rising into genuine eloquence.