Iniusti tumeant, et tuta pace suorum laetentur scelerum; nonque illos vinea fallat, non ager: et noceant illaesi, et crimine crescant: nos quibus in Christo sunt omnia non capiant res occiduae.[1401] Nor is the result of this a sighing resignation: the ideal inspires vigorous action: Sed si quis superest animi vigor, excutiamus peccati servile iugum, ruptisque catenis, in libertatem et patriae redeamus honorem;[1402] and again Nec quia procidimus fusi certamine primo, stare et conflictum vereamur inire secundum;[1403] and throughout there is the note of joyful confidence, the certainty of ultimate victory: ... omnem vincendi nobis vim de victore petamus ... sine quo non stant qui stare videntur. All this is found again in the _Ad Uxorem_. In spite of fire, torture, chains, the final note is a cry of joy: Semper agam grates Christo, dabo semper honorem: laus Domini semper vivet in ore meo.[1404] There can be no doubt that these men were genuine. We feel without being told that the verses are sincerum vivo de fonte liquorem. The ideal was deeply felt and widely spread. Even Sidonius could say of Lupus: ‘tota illi actionum suarum intentio ... Christus est’.[1405] There was a conscious strength in the idealism of these men which counted for much. ‘The Roman world crashes into ruin’, wrote Jerome, in another connexion, ‘yet our heads are upright and unbowed.’[1406] This ideal had its effect on oratory. When Augustine wrote the Christian theory of eloquence,[1407] though he bases the technical part of it entirely on Cicero and though his sermons abound in parallelism, homoioteleuta, and even word-play, yet he made a great advance in declaring that eloquence was not dependent on rhetorical rules but based, rather, on genuine knowledge and true wisdom.[1408] He felt keenly the lack of truth in the rhetorical system. Of its teachers he says that truth was found constantly on their lips but never in their lives: ‘Dicebant Veritas et Veritas, et multum eam dicebant mihi, et nusquam erat in eis, et falsa loquebantur.’[1409] And he laid down his professorship of rhetoric so that he should not be guilty of selling material for the madness of the youths who studied the foolish falsehoods and practised the quibbling disputations of the rhetorical system.[1410] In the _Principia Rhetorices_ he lays stress on understanding the case,[1411] and maintains that the end of oratory is not merely ‘bene aut vere dicere’ (as the later rhetoricians certainly thought), but ‘persuadere’.[1412] Thus he brings out the Christian conception of the essential relation of oratory to man—an ideal which Isocrates and Cicero had preached, but which had gradually been lost.