And as to his emergence from heathenism, there can be nothing more satisfactory to us than his own story. He has recorded that when he found, in Exodus, how God was called “I am that I am,” and when he read in Isaiah (40:12) of a deity who “held the wind in His fists,” and again (66:1) of Him who said, “Heaven is My throne and earth is My footstool,” then this _Deus immensus_ surpassed all his heathen conceptions of grandeur and power. And when he read (in Ps. 138:7) how this great God loved and cared for His children, so that one could say, “Though I walk in the midst of trouble, Thou wilt revive me; Thou shalt stretch forth Thine hand against the wrath of mine enemies, and Thy right hand shall save me”—then he was drawn toward this mighty being by a sentiment of confidence and trust. He also—turning the pages of the Wisdom of Solomon (13:5) in the Apocrypha—found it written that “by the greatness and beauty of the creatures proportionately the Maker of them is seen.” And then, encountering the Gospel of John, its opening sentences clarified his mind. All became plain. He accepted with calmness, firmness, and dignity the great doctrines of the Christian faith. He was imbued with John’s conception of that Word, “which was in the beginning” and “which was God.” From that moment he had a theology which was as pure as crystal and as indestructible as adamant. There is no muddiness about his ideas from this time onward, though Arians buzz and sting, and calamities rain upon him, and the path of duty is deep with mire and the future is dark. Every one of these things passes away. His own language as to this great change in his belief is as characteristic as it is beautiful: “I extended my desires further, and longed that the good thoughts I had about God, and the good life which I built on them, might have an eternal reward.” Like one of his own favorite saints in the Gospel and the Apocalypse of John, he was thus “led by the Spirit of God” to become one of the chanting choir before the throne. It matters very little, therefore, to us of to-day, that, in 1851, Pius IX., himself a man of sweet and gentle temper, made Hilary a “Doctor of the Church”—a distinction reserved for those greatest ones, like Augustine and Chrysostom, whose learning and eloquence are world-renowned. The dead bishop did not need this posthumous distinction. He has long been recognized—to quote Professor Dorner—as “one of the most original and profound,” albeit not the easiest to understand at all times, of the great teachers of the Christian Church. We may hereafter attach more value to his work even than we do at present.