affected by his own reproaches, and by those of his spiritual father;
and after he had bewailed the mischievous and irreparable consequences
of his rash fury, he proceeded, in the accustomed manner, to perform
his devotions in the great church of Milan. He was stopped in the
porch by the archbishop; who, in the tone and language of an
ambassador of Heaven, declared to his sovereign, that private
contrition was not sufficient to atone for a public fault, or to
appease the justice of the offended Deity. Theodosius humbly
represented, that if he had contracted the guilt of homicide, David,
the man after God's own heart, had been guilty, not only of murder,
but of adultery. "You have imitated David in his crime, imitate then
his repentance," was the reply of the undaunted Ambrose. The rigorous
conditions of peace and pardon were accepted; and the public penance
of the emperor Theodosius has been recorded as one of the most
honorable events in the annals of the church. According to the mildest
rules of ecclesiastical discipline, which were established in the
fourth century, the crime of homicide was expiated by the penitence of
twenty years: and as it was impossible, in the period of human life,
to purge the accumulated guilt of the massacre of Thessalonica, the
murderer should have been excluded from the holy communion till the
hour of his death. But the archbishop, consulting the maxims of
religious policy, granted some indulgence to the rank of his
illustrious penitent, who humbled in the dust the pride of the diadem;
and the public edification might be admitted as a weighty reason to
abridge the duration of his punishment. It was sufficient, that the
emperor of the Romans, stripped of the ensigns of royalty, should
appear in a mournful and suppliant posture; and that, in the midst of
the church of Milan, he should humbly solicit, with sighs and tears,
the pardon of his sins. In this spiritual cure, Ambrose employed the
various methods of mildness and severity. After a delay of about eight