This then was the man who had determined to enter upon a Christian life. He was already married and had one daughter—Abra by name—and possessed a certain repute as a man of reading and of affairs. His origin protected him from a contempt of pagan learning; and his marriage protected him from that one-sided development which has Romanized the once Catholic Church. The period in which he lived was one of transition—from classic literature to Christian literature, and from the Latin of far-off Virgil and Cicero to the Latin which was to become the uniting tongue of all scholars in that Babel of the Middle Ages. This language was now shaping itself to its new work and becoming, like English under the genius of Chaucer, a living speech. In the moulding hands of these first Christian writers it became flexible, not always fluent or graceful or even strictly grammatical, but capable at least to carry what would otherwise have been lost. Greek was gone, and French and German and English had not yet appeared. As a Gallo-Roman, then—a post-classic Latinist—Hilary gives in his allegiance to Christianity, and his wife and daughter are baptized with him into the true faith. So far much is conjectural; and more is vague and to be derived from the shadows cast upon the screen of history by the “spirit of the years to come yearning to mix itself with life.” We emerge, however, into historical certainty about the year 351. Then, on the death of their bishop—who is thought to have been Maxentius, the brother of St. Maximin of Trier—his townspeople clamored for Hilary. The _Histoire Litteraire de la France_ sets this election down for the year 350; but that authority, in this and a great many other instances, is profuse and multitudinous and not absolutely safe. We are certainly not far out from the correct date in saying 351. It illustrates a condition of things which are suggestive of the simplicity of the early Church, when we find that in spite of his being a married man and a father—and in spite of Cyprian’s and of Tertullian’s praises of celibacy—Hilary was heartily chosen and almost forced into the episcopate. In this position he exhibited “all the excellent qualities of the great bishops.” We are told that he was “gentle and peaceable, given particularly to an ability to persuade and to influence.” With these he joined “a holy vigor which held him firm against rising heresies.” And Cassian says that Hilary “had all the virtues of an incomparable man.” The fact, after all, speaks for itself more loudly than these commendations. He was so much one of themselves that the people of Poitiers would not have selected him, if they had not known him to be the best man for the mitre.