Under the supposed patronage of those Saints, Trêves rose again out of its ruins. It gained its four great abbeys of St. Maximus (on the site of Constantine’s palace); St. Matthias, in the crypt whereof the bodies of the monks never decay; {30} St. Martin; and St. Mary of the Four Martyrs, where four soldiers of the famous Theban legion are said to have suffered martyrdom by the house of the Roman prefect. It had its cathedral of St. Peter and St. Helena, supposed to be built out of St. Helena’s palace; its exquisite Liebfrauenkirche; its palace of the old Archbishops, mighty potentates of this world, as well as of the kingdom of heaven. For they were princes, arch-chancellors, electors of the empire, owning many a league of fertile land, governing, and that kindly and justly, towns and villages of Christian men, and now and then going out to war, at the head of their own knights and yeomen, in defence of their lands, and of the saints whose servants and trustees they were; and so became, according to their light and their means, the salt of that land for many generations. And after a while that salt, too, lost its savour, and was, in its turn, trodden under foot. The French republican wars swept away the ecclesiastical constitution and the wealth of the ancient city. The cathedral and churches were stripped of relics, of jewels, of treasures of early art. The Prince-bishop’s palace is a barrack; so was lately St. Maximus’s shrine; St. Martin’s a china manufactory, and St. Matthias’s a school. Trêves belongs to Prussia, and not to “Holy Church;” and all the old splendours of the “empire of the saints” are almost as much ruinate as those of the “empire of the Romans.” So goes the world, because there is a living God. “The old order changeth, giving place to the new; And God fulfils himself in many ways, Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.” But though palaces and amphitheatres be gone, the gardens outside still bloom on as when Potitianus his friends wandered through them, perpetual as Nature’s self; and perpetual as Nature, too, endures whatever is good and true of that afternoon’s work, and of that finding of the legend of St. Antony in the monk’s cabin, which fixed the destiny of the great genius of the Latin Church. The story of St. Antony, as it has been handed down to us, {32} runs thus:— * * * * * The life and conversation of our holy Father Antony, written and sent to the monks in foreign parts by our Father among the saints, Athanasius, Archbishop of Alexandria.