mediately followed bis admission within its pale; but he appears to have continued to reside in Poitiers, and so great was the respect in which he came to be held by the citizens there that about
353, although still a married man, he was by the unanimous voice elected bishop. At that time Arianism, which under imperial protection had over- spread the Eastern, was now under similar auspices threaten- ing algo to overrun the Western Church ; to resist and repel the irruption was the great task which Hilary now set himself to achieve. One of his first steps was to secure the excommunication, by those of the Gallican hierarchy who still remained orthodox, of Saturninus, the Arian bishop of Arles, along with Ursacius and Valens, two of the most prominent of the supporters of that prelate. About the same time he wrote to the emperor Constantius a remon- strance against the persecutions by which the Arians had sought to crush their opponents (Ad Constantium Augustum Liber Primus, of which the most probable date is
355). His labours for the triumph of orthodoxy were not in the first instance, however, crowned with success; for at the synod of Biterrze (Beziers), summoned in
356 by Constantius with the professed purpose of settling the long-standing dis- putes, Hilary was by an imperial rescript banished along with Rhodanus of Toulouse to Phrygia, in which exile he spent nearly four
years. From this hostile region, however, he continued to govern his diocese without undue difficulty, no successor having been nominated to the see; while at the same time he found leisure for the preparation of two of the most important of his contributions to dogmatic and polemical theology, the De Synodis, or De Fide Orientalium, an epistle addressed in
358 to the bishops in Gaul, Germany, and Britain, expounding the true views (sometimes veiled in ambiguous words) of the Oriental bishops on the Trini- tarian controversy, and the De Trinitate Librt XII., com- posed in
359 and
360, in which, for the first time, it was successfully attempted to express in the Latin tongue the theological subtleties and refinements which had been elaborated with the aid of the more flexible language of Greece. The former of these works was not entirely approved by some of the members of his own party, who thought he had shown too great forbearance towards the Arians, and had expressed himself too hopefully as to the possibilities of an ultimate reconciliation of the contending views; to their criticisms he replied in the Apologetica ad keprehensores Libri de Synodis Responsa. In
359 Hilary attended the convocation of bishops at Seleucia in Isauria, where, along with the Egyptian Athanasians, he joined the Homoiousian majority against the Arianizing party headed by Acacius of Ceesarea ; thence he betook himself to Con- stantinople, and, in a petition (Ad Constantium Augustum Liber Secundus) personally presented to the emperor in
360, repudiated the personal calumnies of his enemies and sought to vindicate his Trinitarian principles. His urgent and repeated request to be permitted a public discus- sion with his opponents, especially with Ursacius and Valens, proved at last so inconvenient that he was sent back to his diocese, which, accordingly, he appears to have reached about
361, within a very short time of the accession of Julian. ‘Though he was received in his diocese with every demonstration of joy, he yet found Arianism strong enough there to demand his best energy and skill for the next two or three years; but in
364, extending his efforts once more beyond Gaul, he impeached Auxentius, bishop of Milan, and a man high in the imperial favour, as hetero- dox. Summoned to appear before the emperor (Valen- tinian) at Milan and there maintain his charges in person, Hilary had the mortification of hearing the supposed heretic give answers entirely satisfactory to all the questions which were proposed ; nor did his (doubtless sincere) denunciation of the metropolitan as a hypocrite save himself from an ignominious expulsion from Milan as a disturber of the peace of the church. In
365 he published the Contra Arwunos vel Auxentium Mediolanensem Liber, in connexion with the controversy ; and also (but perhaps at a somewhat earlier date) the Cozrtra Constantium Augustum Liber, in which he pronounced that lately deceased emperor to have been Antichrist, a rebel against God, “ a tyrant whose sole object had been to make a gift to the devil of that world for which Christ had suffered.” The later years of Hilary’s life were spent in comparative quiet and retirement, devoted in part to the preparation of his expositions of the Psalms (Zractatus super Psalmos), for which he was largely indebted to Origen ; of his Commentarius in Evangelium Mattha, a work of no exegetical value; and of his no longer extant treatise on the book of Job. He died 13th January
368. His great energy and zeal, courage and perseverance, rendered him a very influential ecclesiastic during his life ; while, in virtue at once of the depth and acuteness of his intellect and of the wide extent of his knowledge, he holds the very highest rank among the Latin writers of his century. Designated already by Augustine as “the illustrious doctor of the churches,” he by his works exerted an increasing in- fluence in later centuries ; and by Pius IX. he was formally recognized as “universe ecclesize doctor” at the synod of Bordeaux in 1851. Hilary’s day in the Roman calendar is January 14; the English “ Hilary Term” begins on the 11th and ends on the 31st.
HILDA, or Hild (614–680), usually called St Hilda, a Saxon lady whose name is intimately associated with the history of the early English church and of early English literature. She was a member of the royal family of Northumbria, her father Hereric being a nephew of King Edwin ; and it was along with her royal kinsman that, as a girl of fourteen, she received baptism at the hands of Paulinus. During the pagan reaction which followed Edwin’s defeat and death, Hilda was tempted to settle with her widowed sister Hereswith at the monastery of Chelles, 12 miles from Paris; but she was recalled to England by Bishop Aidan, the missionary from Iona, and in 649, two years after her consecration as a nun, she was appointed to succeed Heru the abbess of Heortea or Hartlepool. When, in fulfilment of the vow which he had made before the decisive battle with Penda, Oswy came to dedicate his daughter to God, it was to the care of Hilda that he entrusted her. In 658 the abbess founded the famous mon- astery on the cliffs at Streoneshalh or Whitby, and for the next twenty-two years she ruled with rare ability and virtue over the double community of monks and nuns which gathered round her. Among those who shed the most abiding lustre on the establishment were St John of Beverley and the Saxon poet Cedmon. Hilda died, full of years, in 680, mourned by her nuns as their common mother. There is a St Hilda’s church both at South Shields and at Hartlepool, and the latter preserves her effigy on its ancient seal. At Whitby the tradition long lingered that on a summer forenoon, when the sun shone in the highest windows of the north part of the abbey, a figure of Lady Hilda could be discerned ; and the fossil ammonites of the neighbourhood are popularly known as St Hilda’s snakes. See Bede, Eccl. Hist., xxiv. ; Dr G. Young, Hist. of Whitby, 1817 ; Sir Cuthbert Sharp, Hest. of Hartlepool, 1816.
