A Bishop’s special office is to teach; St. Ambrose himself, however, has to learn in order that he may teach; or rather has to teach what he has not learnt; at any rate learning and teaching with himself must go on together.

1. I think I shall not seem to be taking too much on myself, if, in the midst of my children, I yield to my desire to teach, seeing that the master of humility himself has said: “Come, ye children, hearken unto me: I will teach you the fear of the Lord.”²⁸

28 Ps. xxxiv. [xxxiii.] 11.

29 Ib. cxii. [cxi.] 1.

2. We therefore, being anxious to imitate his reverence for God, and not without justification in dispensing grace, deliver to you as to children those things which the Spirit of Wisdom has imparted to him, and which have been made clear to us through him, and learnt by sight and by example. For we can no longer now escape from the duty of teaching which the needs of the priesthood have laid upon us, though we tried to avoid it:³⁰

30 Paulinus, in his Life of St. Ambrose, relates various expedients that he tried, to enable him to avoid the office to which he had been called; e.g. how he caused torture to be applied to prisoners, contrary to his usual practice, in the hope that this might lead to his rejection. More than once, also, he endeavoured to escape the honour by flight.

31 Eph. iv. 11.

3. I do not therefore claim for myself the glory of the apostles (for who can do this save those whom the Son of God Himself has chosen?); nor the grace of the prophets, nor the virtue of the evangelists, nor the cautious care of the pastors. I only desire to attain to that care and diligence in the sacred writings, which the Apostle has placed last amongst the duties of the saints;³²

32 1 Cor. xii. 10.

4. But not even this was the case with me. For I was carried off from the judgment seat, and the garb [infulis] of office, to enter on the priesthood,³³

33 St. Ambrose, at the time of his election to the episcopate, was a consular magistrate, and was not even baptized. The infula was a flock of red and white wool formed into a fillet, and worn on the head; from which ribands hung down on either side. It was a mark of religious consecration, and so worn by the priests and vestal virgins. In later times it was adopted also by the emperors and magistrates as a sign of their semi-sacred character.

34 The following is found in many mss., but not in the Benedictine edition. “Et quantumlibet quisque profecerit nemo est qui docere non egeat dum vivit.”

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