The later and more famous triumph of Ambrose—when, before the doors of the same Basilica Nova, he stood, armed only with the insignia of his sacerdotal office, and barred the entrance of the sanctuary to the blood-stained Emperor Theodosius, till, awed by his spiritual dignity, the wearer of the purple sank before the white-robed priest and did public penance for the massacre of Thessalonica—was another and greater proof of the ascendency of the ecclesiastical over the imperial power. But the significance of the scene reaches further, and embraces the whole sphere of humanity. In standing bishop and kneeling king we see, not the individuals and their immediate motives, ambitious, despotic, superstitious, as they may partly have been, not even the struggle of great transitory interests, but a wider, deeper, more enduring principle—the recognition of the supremacy of spirit over brute force, the victory of the Christian ideal of love and pity over the earthly lusts of blood and revenge, of the religion which adores the helpless Mother and Child over the deified Force of the ancient creeds. Ambrose was now the most powerful man in the Empire, ruling the minds of men by the sheer strength of character and lofty virtue. The Barbarians in their distant lands testified to the might of his saintliness—this man who, as a Frankish king asserted with awe, _says to the sun, ‘Stand still,’ and it stands_. The two young Emperors, Gratian and Valentinian, were tools in his hands, and Theodosius himself had to acknowledge the Church in the person of Ambrose as a twin power in the realm. When the Bishop died in 397, he bequeathed to his successors an episcopal dominion so strengthened by his powerful personality, and glorified by the sanctity of his life and doctrine, that it was ever after associated with his name, and known as the Ambrosian Church. With its numerous and wealthy dependent bishoprics, its Arch-Pontiff or Pope, its cardinals, as the chief clergy were called later, and immense hierarchy, its peculiar liturgy and ritual, this Church was accorded the title of Holy—_Santa Chiesa_—and acknowledged as self-governing by Gregory the Great himself.