GIRDLE. See Vestments and Insignia, Ecclesiastical.

GIRDLESTONE, ROBERT BAKER: Church of England; b. at Sedgley (13 m, n.w. of Birmingham), Staffordshire, Oct. 3, 1836. He studied at Charterhouse, London, and Christ Church, Oxford (B.A., 1859), and was head of the translation department of the British and Foreign Bible Society 1866-76, principal of Wycliffe Hall, Oxford, 1877,89, and minister of St. John's, Downshire Hill, Hampstead, 1889-1901. He is an honorary canon of Christ Church. He has served on various committees and subcommittees connected with the Church Missionary Society, the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, the British and Foreign Bible Society, the London Jews' Society, the National Protestant Church Union, and similar organizations. In theology he is a liberal Evangelical, but is conservative on Biblical questions. He has written Anatomy of Scepticism (London, 1863); Dies Ira, (1869); Synonyms of the Old Testament (1871); How to Study the English Bible (1887); Foundations oj the Bible (1890); Doctor Doctorum (1892); DecoterograPhs: Duplicate Passages in the Old Testament (1894); The Student's Deuteronomy (1899); Grammar of Prophecy (1901); Why do 1 believe in Jesus Christ (1904); The Churchman's Guide (1905); and Monotheism, Hebrew and Christian (1907).

GLABRIO, gld-bri', MANIUS ACILIUS: Roman consul in the year 91, afterward banished and put to death by Domitian 95 A.D. He belonged to a family distinguished in Roman history from 200 s.C. till the end of the empire, especially in the second century, and has interest for church history because of certain fragments of epitaphs discovered by De Rossi in 1888 in an aisle of the catacombs of St. Priscilla on the Via Salaria near Rome. Because of the honorary epithets employed, the epitaphs can hardly refer to freedmen of the gens Acilia, but must mark the resting-places of actual members of the family (cf. Prosographia imperii Romani saeculorum 1. 111., ed. E. Klebs, pp. 7,8, nos. 54-59, Berlin, 1897), who were evidently, from the wording of the inscriptions, Christians or at least friends of Christians. Evidence thus appears to be offered that even before the time of Commodus (cf. Eusebius, Hist. eccl., v. 21) some of the prominent circles of the Roman nobility were favorably disposed toward Christianity, and perhaps actual conversions occurred. It is possible that Glabrio was put to death as a Christian (see Domitian).

(Edgar Henneke.)

Bibliography: G. de Rosci, in Bullettino di archeologia. criatiana, pp. 15 sqq.,103 sqq., table v.,1888-89; W. Smith, Dictionary of Greek and & .,nan Biography, ii. 272, London, 1890 (gives early sources for a life).