Mone is nearer to the correct doctrine when he assigns it to a period between the sixth and eighth centuries. Daniel (4:130) prints it in full and quotes Mone’s remark that an Irish monk is likely to have been its author. It is in the metre familiar to modern eyes in the _Integer vitae_ of Horace, but it displays neither taste nor poetry nor any religious fervor. That it begins each stanza with a consecutive letter of the alphabet is no proof of anything except wasted ingenuity. So that, I repeat, we do well to reject it and to leave it rejected. All, then, that is left us is the _Lucis largitor splendide_—“Thou splendid giver of the light.” The letter went back from Seleucia to Poitiers and carried this hymn, at least, with it. Hilary had sent this and its companion, _ut memor mei semper sis_—“that you may always remember me.” And we may fancy the lovely high-born daughter of that earnest and scholarly man as, daily and nightly, she sits at her window—perchance with her gaze wistfully turned to the eastward. There she sang these simple, beautiful hymns—she the first singer of the new hymns of the Latin Church. Among the themes for Christian art yet left to us there is hardly one more suggestive than this—for Abra doubtless sang her father’s hymns to her father’s loyal people. It may even be supposed that he gave her the tunes as well as the words, and that, by morning and by night, the battle-scarred Poitiers re-echoed this voice of the exiled bishop. Of the hymn itself as much can be said in favor as we have just said against its pretended and ill-matched companion. It breathes the Johannean sentiments throughout. It celebrates the Light, the Son of God, the glory of the Father, “clearer than the full sun, the perfect light and day itself.” To one who is acquainted with the Greek hymns it is instantly suggestive of those pellucid songs—its atmosphere is all peace and its trust is as restful to the tired spirit as the quiet coming of the rising day. It may easily have been a translation from the Greek, or, even more easily, the natural up-gush of melody which was touched into life by the frequent hearing of the Eastern hymns. Hilary never learned it in an Arian church, nor did he find it among controversialists. Its nest, where it was first reared, was in some corner of a catacomb or in some nook of the Holy Land. This hymn, then, we may safely accept as the oldest authentic original Latin “song of praise to Christ as God.”