Note 3 — PROLOGUE.

St. Aug. Epist. 137, ad Volusianum, § 15-16. A.D. 412. It is remarkable that Volusian, who held the highest offices in the Roman Empire, and among the rest was Prefect of the City, was not converted either by the genius or the saintliness of Augustine. But more than twenty years after this letter, about A.D. 435, he was sent on an embassy from the Emperor of the West to the Emperor of the East at Constantinople. His niece, St. Melania the younger, left the seclusion of her monastery at Jerusalem, and travelled all the intervening distance to see him. When he met in the garb of humility and poverty the niece whom he remembered at Rome in all the splendour of youth, rank, and beauty at the head of the Roman nobility, he was so impressed by the force of Christian charity which had wrought such a change, that he was converted and baptized by the Patriarch Proclus, and died shortly afterwards. God did by the sight of the nun what he had not done by the learning of the theologian and the philosopher.