From this time began that career of stainless honor which has outlasted the very walls which echoed his voice. He was known from Great Britain to the Indies. He ranks second only to Athanasius as a defender of the faith; and—as we already noted—he is classed by Jerome with the great bishop of Hippo whose portrait is given to us so vividly in Charles Kingsley’s _Hypatia_. And to us of our century and of our convictions in favor of charity and culture, it is particularly praiseworthy that he never gave up his secular scholarship, and that he never flagged or faltered in defending opinions which were as large and liberal as they were undeniably orthodox. He was an oak which stood against the blast unshaken, and which yet held, in the heart of its great branches, sweet nests of singing birds and leafy coverts of shade and peace. Hilary was not suffered to be inactive. It was the period at which the Arian heresy was in full incandescence. No one holding the opinions of the Bishop of Poitiers could well remain neutral. He had—in conformity with a custom soon to become a law—separated his life from that of his home; but he appears always to have cherished a warm love for his wife and child. This placed him, however, in perfect freedom from other cares, and at liberty to devote himself to the eradication of false doctrine. Constantius, the Emperor, was an Arian, and this made the perplexity of the position very great. An honest man might ruin all by his blunt independence—but an honest man dare not be silent. And, besides, Hilary had neither attended the Synod of Arles (353) nor that of Milan (355), and was somewhat out of the ecclesiastical tide. That he was no coward was soon shown to everybody’s satisfaction. He prepared a letter to the Emperor as brave as it was keen, and which touched up with a vigorous lash the cringing sycophants and shuffling hypocrites about the court. Hilary is notably strong when he denounces the substitution of force for reason—and perhaps his doctorate came to him only in 1851 (when he could not well care much for it) because this doctrine of his was not altogether what Mother Church has been in the habit of teaching and practising! I may refer to the recent work of the Rev. R. T. Smith upon _The Church in Roman Gaul_ as fully confirming this statement. St. Martin of Tours is there called to bear testimony that the Bishop of Poitiers held such opinions just as sturdily in his days of power as in these times of trial and persecution. He was, in short, a thoroughly sincere man, and it took him only a few years—until 355—to get into the hottest bubbling spot of all the caldron. At that date, in company with other leaders of the church in Gaul, he drove out a very pestilent fellow—Saturninus, the Bishop of Arles—as a seditious and irreconcilable element in their midst. With him was cast out Valens, and with Valens was cast out Ursacius. But of all these, Bishop Saturninus was the angriest and the most revengeful.