The siege in the basilica at Milan had an important bearing on the whole future of the Christian Church. Augustine tells us how his mother Monica had followed him to Milan, and how when there “she hastened the more eagerly to the church and hung upon the lips of Ambrose.” (_Aug. Conf._, B. vi.) “That man,” he continues, “she loved as an angel of God because she knew that by him I had been brought to that doubtful state of faith I now was in.” She evidently anticipated that so eloquent a preacher would complete the work that he had been permitted to begin. As for Augustine himself, he felt “shut out both from his ear and speech by multitudes of busy people whose weaknesses he served.” How finely, by the way, this very expression illustrates the greatness of Ambrose’s character and the unselfishness of his life! We get also a picture of the man as a student—one whose voice would become worn by any extended public speaking, and who therefore read to himself in his private studies in a manner unusual apparently in that age—namely, as we do now, without opening his lips or articulating the words. The effect of Justina’s persecution is also given most graphically. (_Aug. Conf._, B. ix.) For Augustine, having first told us how these heavenly voices fell upon his ear, says that his mother “bore a chief part of those anxieties and watchings” and “lived for prayer.” At this date, he emphatically declares, “it was first instituted that after the manner of the Eastern churches, hymns and psalms should be sung lest the people should wax faint through the tediousness of sorrow; and from that day to this the custom is retained, divers (yea, almost all) congregations throughout other parts of the world following herein.” It is he, moreover, who tells us that the two martyrs’ bodies were transferred to that Ambrosian church erected in 387, and where afterward were placed the bones of its great founder; which was spared by Barbarossa in 1162, and which, as the church of San Ambrogio, still occupies its old site in Milan. Thus we have the most important of contemporary testimony to some of these troublous scenes.