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Patres conscripti, pā′tres kon-skrip′tī, n.pl. conscript fathers: the senators of ancient Rome.

Some one, who had a right to write what he liked, even nonsense;—Tiberius, I believe, began a letter to the Roman senate thus: 'Conscript Fathers, you expect a letter from me; but may all the gods and goddesses confound me, if I know on what to write, how to begin, how to go on, or what to leave out:' his perplexity arose certainly from a cause very different from that which occasions mine, though the result appears to be nearly the same.

And when the great day came and the Infanta was met at the station by the Conscript Fathers, a pæan of joy found voice in print: “He wore a tall hat.”

But as a Roman orator, over two thousand years ago, exclaimed in the senate-house of Rome, "Conscript fathers: long since, indeed, we have lost the true names of things," so may we, in the bosom of the professing Church, at the close of the nineteenth century, repeat, with far greater force, "Long since we have lost the true names of things."

In ancient Rome the members of the senate are the Patres conscripti, the “Conscript fathers.”