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(TRANSLATED BY THE REV. S. THELWALL.)
BLESSED Martyrs Designate,—Along with the provision which our
lady mother the Church from her bountiful breasts, and each brother out
of his private means, makes for your bodily wants in the prison, accept
also from me some contribution to your spiritual sustenance; for it is
not good that the flesh be feasted and the spirit starve: nay, if that
which is weak be carefully looked to, it is but right that that which
is still weaker should not be neglected. Not that I am specially
entitled to exhort you; yet not only the trainers and overseers, but
even the unskilled, nay, all who choose, without the slightest need for
it, are wont to animate from afar by their cries the most accomplished
gladiators, and from the mere throng of onlookers useful suggestions
have sometimes come; first, then, O blessed, grieve not the Holy
Spirit,[2] who has entered the prison with you; for if He had not gone
with you there, you would not have been there this day. Do you give all
endeavour, therefore, to retain Him; so let Him lead you thence to your
Lord. The prison, indeed, is the devil's house as well, wherein he
keeps his family. But you have come within its walls for the very
purpose of trampling the wicked one under foot in his chosen abode. You
had already in pitched battle outside utterly overcome him; let him
have no reason, then, to say to himself, "They are now in my domain;
with vile hatreds I shall tempt them, with defections or dissensions
among themselves." Let him fly from your presence, and skulk away into
his own abysses, shrunken and torpid, as though he were an outcharmed
or smoked-out snake. Give him not the success in his own kingdom of
setting you at variance with each other, but let him find you armed and
fortified with concord; for peace among you is battle with him. Some,
not able to find this peace in the Church, have been used to seek it
from the imprisoned martyrs.[3] And so you ought to have it dwelling
with you, and to cherish it, and to guard it, that you may be able
perhaps to bestow it upon others.
Other things, hindrances equally of the soul, may have
accompanied you as far as the prison gate, to which also your relatives
may have attended you. There and thenceforth you were severed from the
world; how much more from the ordinary course of worldly life and all
its affairs! Nor let this separation from the world alarm you; for if
we reflect that the world is more really the prison, we shall see that
you have gone out of a prison rather than into one. The world has the
greater darkness, blinding men's hearts. The world imposes the more
grievous fetters, binding men's very souls. The world breathes out the
worst impurities—human lusts. The world contains the larger number of
criminals, even the whole human race. Then, last of all, it awaits the
judgment, not of the proconsul, but of God. Wherefore, O blessed, you
may regard yourselves as having been translated from a prison to, we
may say, a place of safety. It is full of darkness, but ye yourselves
are light; it has bonds, but God has made you free. Unpleasant
exhalations are there, but ye are an odour of sweetness. The judge is
daily looked for, but ye shall judge the judges themselves. Sadness may
be there for him who sighs for the world's enjoyments. The Christian
outside the prison has renounced the world, but in the prison he has
renounced a prison too. It is of no consequence where you are in the
world—you who are not of it. And if you have lost some of life's
sweets, it is the way of business to suffer present loss, that after
gains may be the larger. Thus far I say nothing of the rewards to which
God invites the martyrs. Meanwhile let us compare the life of the world
and of the prison, and see if the spirit does not gain more in the
prison than the flesh loses. Nay, by the care of the Church and the
love of the brethren,[1] even the flesh does not lose there what is for
its good, while the spirit obtains besides important advantages. You
have no occasion to look on strange gods, you do not run against their
images; you have no part in heathen holidays, even by mere bodily
mingling in them; you are not annoyed by the foul fumes of idolatrous
solemnities; you are not pained by the noise of the public shows, nor
by the atrocity or madness or immodesty of their celebrants; your eyes
do not fall on stews and brothels; you are free from causes of offence,
from temptations, from unholy reminiscences; you are free now from
persecution too. The prison does the same service for the Christian
which the desert did for the prophet. Our Lord Himself spent much of
His time in seclusion, that He might have greater liberty to pray, that
He might be quit of the world. It was in a mountain solitude, too, He
showed His glory to the disciples. Let us drop the name of prison; let
us call it a place of retirement. Though the body is shut in, though
the flesh is confined, all things are open to the spirit. In spirit,
then, roam abroad; in spirit walk about, not setting before you shady
paths or long colonnades, but the way which leads to God. As often as
in spirit your footsteps are there, so often you will not be in bonds.
The leg does not feel the chain when the mind is in the heavens. The
mind compasses the whole man about, and whither it wills it carries
him. But where thy heart shall be, there shall be thy treasure.[2] Be
there our heart, then, where we would have our treasure.
Grant now, O blessed, that even to Christians the prison is
unpleasant; yet we were called to the warfare of the living God in our
very response to the sacramental words. Well, no soldier comes out to
the campaign laden with luxuries, nor does he go to action from his
comfortable chamber, but from the light and narrow tent, where every
kind of hardness, roughness and unpleasantness must be put up with.
Even in peace soldiers inure themselves to war by toils and
inconveniences—marching in arms, running over the plain, working at
the ditch, making the testudo, engaging in many arduous labours. The
sweat of the brow is on everything, that bodies and minds may not
shrink at having to pass from shade to sunshine, from sunshine to icy
cold, from the robe of peace to the coat of mail, from silence to
clamour, from quiet to tumult. In like manner, O blessed ones, count
whatever is hard in this lot of yours as a discipline of your powers of
mind and body. You are about to pass through a noble struggle, in which
the living God acts the part of superintendent, in which the Holy Ghost
is your trainer, in which the prize is an eternal crown of angelic
essence, citizenship in the heavens, glory everlasting. Therefore your
Master, Jesus Christ, who has anointed you with His Spirit, and led you
forth to the arena, has seen it good, before the day of conflict, to
take you from a condition more pleasant in itself, and has imposed on
you a harder treatment, that your strength might be the greater. For
the athletes, too, are set apart to a more stringent discipline, that
they may have their physical powers built up. They are kept from
luxury, from daintier meats, from more pleasant drinks; they are
pressed, racked, worn out; the harder their labours in the preparatory
training, the stronger is the hope of victory. "And they," says the
apostle, "that they may obtain a corruptible crown."[3] We, with the
crown eternal in our eye, look upon the prison as our training-ground,
that at the goal of final judgment we may be brought forth well
disciplined by many a trial; since virtue is built up by hardships, as
by voluptuous indulgence it is overthrown.
From the saying of our Lord we know that the flesh is weak, the
spirit willing.[4] Let us not, withal, take delusive comfort from the
Lord's acknowledgment of the weakness of the flesh. For precisely on
this account He first declared the spirit willing, that He might show
which of the two ought to be subject to the other—that the flesh might
yield obedience to the spirit—the weaker to the stronger; the former
thus from the latter getting strength. Let the spirit hold convene with
the flesh about the common salvation, thinking no longer of the
troubles of the prison, but of the wrestle and conflict for which they
are the preparation. The flesh, perhaps, will dread the merciless
sword, and the lofty cross, and the rage of the wild beasts, and that
punishment of the flames, of all most terrible, and all the skill of
the executioner in torture. But, on the other side, let the spirit set
clearly before both itself and the flesh, how these things, though
exceeding painful, have yet been calmly endured by many,—and, have
even been eagerly desired for the sake of fame and glory; and this not
only in the case of men, but of women too, that you, O holy women, may
be worthy of your sex. It would take me too long to enumerate one by
one the men who at their own self-impulse have put an end to
themselves. As to women, there is a famous case at hand: the violated
Lucretia, in the presence of her kinsfolk, plunged the knife into
herself, that she might have glory for her chastity. Mucius burned his
right hand on an altar, that this deed of his might dwell in fame. The
philosophers have been outstripped,—for instance Heraclitus, who,
smeared with cowdung, burned himself; and Empedocles, who leapt down
into the fires of AEtna; and Peregrinus,[1] who not long ago threw
himself on the funeral pile. For women even have despised the flames.
Dido did so, lest, after the death of a husband very dear to her, she
should be compelled to marry again; and so did the wife of Hasdrubal,
who, Carthage being on fire, that she might not behold her husband
suppliant as Scipio's feet, rushed with her children into the
conflagration, in which her native city was destroyed. Regulus, a Roman
general, who had been taken prisoner by the Carthaginians, declined to
be exchanged for a large number of Carthaginian captives, choosing
rather to be given back to the enemy. He was crammed into a sort of
chest; and, everywhere pierced by nails driven from the outside, he
endured so many crucifixions. Woman has voluntarily sought the wild
beasts, and even asps, those serpents worse than bear or bull, which
Cleopatra applied to herself, that she might not fall into the hands of
her enemy. But the fear of death is not so great as the fear of
torture. And so the Athenian courtezan succumbed to the executioner,
when, subjected to torture by the tyrant for having taken part in a
conspiracy, still making no betrayal of her confederates, she at last
bit off her tongue and spat it in the tyrant's face, that he might be
convinced of the uselessness of his torments, however long they should
be continued. Everybody knows what to this day is the great
Lacedaemonian solemnity—the diamastugwsis , or scourging; in which
sacred rite the Spartan youths are beaten with scourges before the
altar, their parents and kinsmen standing by and exhorting them to
stand it bravely out. For it will be always counted more honourable and
glorious that the soul rather than the body has given itself to
stripes. But if so high a value is put on the earthly glory, won by
mental and bodily vigour, that men, for the praise of their fellows, I
may say, despise the sword, the fire, the cross, the wild beasts, the
torture; these surely are but trifling sufferings to obtain a celestial
glory and a divine reward. If the bit of glass is so precious, what
must the true pearl be worth? Are we not called on, then, most joyfully
to lay out as much for the true as others do for the false?
I leave out of account now the motive of glory. All these same
cruel and painful conflicts, a mere vanity you find among men—in fact,
a sort of mental disease—as trampled under foot. How many ease-lovers
does the conceit of arms give to the sword? They actually go down to
meet the very wild beasts in vain ambition; and they fancy themselves
more winsome from the bites and scars of the contest. Some have sold
themselves to fires, to run a certain distance in a burning tunic.
Others, with most enduring shoulders, have walked about under the
hunters' whips. The Lord has given these things a place in the world, O
blessed, not without some reason: for what reason, but now to animate
us, and on that day to confound us if we have feared to suffer for the
truth, that we might be saved, what others out of vanity have eagerly
sought for to their ruin?
Passing, too, from examples of enduring constancy having such an
origin as this, let us turn to a simple contemplation of man's estate
in its ordinary conditions, that mayhap from things which happen to us
whether we will or no, and which we must set our minds to bear, we may
get instruction. How often, then, have fires consumed the living! How
often have wild beasts torn men in pieces, it may be in their own
forests, or it may be in the heart of cities, when they have chanced to
escape from their dens! How many have fallen by the robber's sword !
How many have suffered at the hands of enemies the death of the cross,
after having been tortured first, yes, and treated with every sort of
contumely ! One may even suffer in the cause of a man what he hesitates
to suffer in the cause of God. In reference to this indeed, let the
present time[1] bear testimony, when so many persons of rank have met
with death in a mere human being's cause, and that though from their
birth and dignities and bodily condition and age such a fate seemed
most unlikely; either suffering at his hands if they have taken part
against him, or from his enemies if they have been his partisans.