human
Oratio Panegyrica was delivered at Caesarea, and after the date of Origen's twenty years as catechist at Alexandria; but it will be readily understood that the whole spirit, and, indeed, the whole details, of the composition are as applicable to Alexandria as to Caesarea; for his teaching work was precisely of the same nature at the latter city as at the former, with a trifling difference in his position. The oration of St. Gregory is a formal and solemn effort of rhetoric, spoken at some public meeting, perhaps in the school, in the presence of learned men and of fellow-students, and of the master himself. It is written very elegantly and eloquently, but it is in a style that we should call young, did we not know that to make parade of apophthegms and weighty sayings, to moralize rather too much, to pursue metaphors unnecessarily, and to beat about a thing with words so as to do everything but say it, was the characteristic of most orators, old and young, from the days of Ptolemy Philadelphus till the days when oratory, as a profession, expired before anarchy and the barbarians. But its literary merits, though great, are the least of its recommendations. Its value as a theological monument is shown by the appeals made to it in the controversy against Arius; and in more recent times Bishop Bull, for instance, has made great use of it in his
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Defensio Fidei Nicaenae.