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130 Pages
Page 117
All the town crowded to the spot where the martyrdom was to be consummated. Gordius uttered his last words. Death is the common lot of man. As we must all die, let us through death win life. Make the necessary voluntary. Exchange the earthly for the heavenly. He then crossed himself, he stepped forward for the fatal blow, without changing colour or losing his cheerful mien. It seemed as though he were not going to meet an executioner, but to yield himself into the hands of angels. [691]
Homily XIX. is on the Forty Soldier Martyrs of Sebaste, who were ordered by the officers of Licinius, a.d. 320, to offer sacrifice to the heathen idols, and, at their refusal, were plunged for a whole night into a frozen pond in the city, in sight of a hot bath on the brink. One man's faith and fortitude failed him. He rushed to the relief of the shore, plunged into the hot water, and died on the spot. One of the executioners had stood warming himself and watching the strange scene. He had seemed to see angels coming down from heaven and distributing gifts to all the band but one. When the sacred number of forty was for the moment broken the officer flung off his clothes, and sprang into the freezing pond with the cry, "I am a Christian." Judas departed. Matthias took his place....
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What trouble wouldst thou not have taken to find one to pray for thee to the Lord! Here are forty, praying with one voice. Where two or three are gathered together in the name of the Lord, there is He in the midst. Who doubts His presence in the midst of forty? The afflicted flees to the Forty; the joyous hurries to them; the former, that he may find relief from his troubles; the latter, that his blessings may be preserved. Here a pious woman is found beseeching for her children; she begs for the return of her absent husband, or for his health if he be sick. Let your supplications be made with the martyrs. Let young men imitate their fellows. Let fathers pray to be fathers of like sons. Let mothers learn from a good mother. The mother of one of these saints saw the rest overcome by the cold, and her son, from his strength or his constancy, yet alive. The executioners had left him, on the chance of his having changed his mind. She herself lifted him in her arms, and placed him on the car in which the rest were being drawn to the pyre, a veritable martyr's mother. [692]
[691] For the tortures and modes of execution enumerated, Du Duc compares Aristoph., Pax. 452, Chrysost., De Luciano Martyre, and Nicephorus vi. 14.
[692] The name of this youngest of the Forty is given as Melito (D.C.B. s.v.). They are commemorated on March 9 in the Roman Kalendar of Gregory XIII. and the Menology of Basil; on March 10 in the Roman Mart. of Bened. XIV.; on the 11th in the old Roman Kal., and on March 16 in the Armenian. The legend of the discovery of some of their relics is given in Sozomen ix. 2. Others were obtained for the church built in their honour at Annesi. (cf. p. xiv.) Two doctrinal points come out in this homily, (a) The officer who took the place of Melito is said to have been baptized, not in water but in his own blood (S: 7). Here is martyrdom represented as the equivalent of baptism. (b) The stage arrived at in the progress of Christian sentiment towards the invocation of departed saints is indicated. Garnier, the Jesuit, writes in the margin of the passage quoted above, Invocantur martyres; and Ceillier notes, Il reconnait que les prieres des martyrs peuvent beaucoup nous aider aupres de Dieu. But in this particular passage the idea of "fleeing to the Forty" seems to be not fleeing to them to ask for their prayers, but fleeing to the shrine to pray in company with them. It is rather the fellowship than the intercession of the saints which is sought. meta marturon gignestho ta aitemata humon. Let your requests be made not to but with the martyrs. In the Homily on St. Mamas, the next in order, the expressions are less equivocal. At the same time it must be remarked that with St. Basil the invocation and the intercession are local. In the De Sp. Scto. (chap. xxiii. p. 34) a significant contrast is drawn between the ubiquity of the Holy Ghost and the limited and local action of angels. And if of angels, so of saints. The saints who have departed this life are thought of as accessible at the shrines where their relics rest, but, if we apply the analogy of the De Sp. Scto., not everywhere. It has been said that this is the period when requests for the prayers of the holy dead begin to appear, and Archbishop Ussher (Address to a Jesuit, chap. ix.) cites Gregory of Nazianzus for the earliest instance within his knowledge of a plain invocation of the departed. But, as bishop Harold Browne points out, his invocation is rather rhetorical than supplicatory. Gregory "had even a pious persuasion that they still continued as much as ever to aid with their prayers those for whom they had been wont to pray on earth (Orat. xxiv. p. 425). And he ventures to think if it be not too bold to say so (ei me tolueron touto eipein), that the saints, being nearer to God and having put off the fetters of the flesh, have more avail with Him than when on earth (Orat. xix. p. 228). In all these he does not appear to have gone further than some who preceded him, nor is there anything in such speculations beyond what might be consistent with the most Protestant abhorrence of saint worship and Mariolatry" (Bp. Harold Browne in Art. xxii.). Romish authorities in support of a yet earlier development, point to Irenaeus (Adv. Haer. v. 19), wherein a highly rhetorical passage the Virgin Mary is said to have become the "advocate" of the Virgin Eve, and to Origen, who "invoked" his guardian angel (Hom. i. in Ezek. 7). The later mediaeval invocation Bp. Jeremy Taylor (vol. vi. Eden's ed. p. 489) ingeniously shews to be of a piece rather with early heresy than with early Catholicity: "It pretends to know their present state, which is hid from our eyes; and it proceeds upon the very reason upon which the Gnostics and Valentinians went; that is, that it is fit to have mediators between God and us; that we may present our prayers to them, and they to God. To which add that the Church of Rome presenting candles and other donaries to the Virgin Mary as to the Queen of heaven, do that which the Collyridians did (Epiphan. Haer. lxxix. vol. i. p. 1057). The gift is only differing, as candle and cake, gold and garments, this vow or that vow."
Reference address : https://www.elpenor.org/basil/life-works.asp?pg=117
