very strenuously in the
affairs of the Empire. She found herself in the position which she
occupied, and endeavored to preserve herself and her son in safety.
Tolerance was marked in all that she did, and there was a very evident
willingness to leave others unmolested, provided she and her son were
allowed to maintain their position in security. Of course, while they
retained the names of empress-mother and emperor, their real power was
but slight. Valentinian II. was never more than a boy, and Justina
possessed no military command. Nevertheless, it does seem as if she were
endowed with some real ability, or she could not have maintained herself
in comparative security during seventeen years of such troublous and
changeful times.

Justina's controversy with Saint Ambrose seems to have been the one
point on which she had serious difficulty with her subjects, and this
appears to have affected only the people of Milan. Gibbon, in his
inimitable manner, thus describes the incident: "The government of Italy
and of the young emperor naturally devolved to his mother Justina, a
woman of beauty and spirit, but who, in the midst of an orthodox people,
had the misfortune of professing the Arian heresy, which she endeavored
to instil into the mind of her son. Justina was persuaded that a Roman
emperor might claim, in his own dominions, the public exercise of his
religion; and she proposed to the archbishop, as a moderate and
reasonable concession, that he should resign the use of a single church,
either in the city or suburbs of Milan. But the conduct of Ambrose was
governed by very different principles. The palaces of earth might indeed
belong to Caesar, but the churches were the houses of God; and, within
the limits of his diocese, he himself, as the lawful successor of the
apostles, was the only minister of God. The privileges of Christianity,
temporal as well as spiritual, were confined to the true believers; and
the mind of Ambrose was satisfied that his own theological opinions were
the standard of truth and orthodoxy. The archbishop, who refused to hold
any conference or negotiation with the instruments of Satan, declared
with modest firmness his resolution to die a martyr rather than to yield
to the impious sacrilege; and Justina, who resented the refusal as an
act of insolence and rebellion, hastily determined to exert the imperial
prerogative of her son."

Under ordinary circumstances, in a like situation, it is very pr