On the Lapsed 4

These heavenly crowns of the martyrs, these spiritual glories of the confessors, these very great and excellent virtues of the brothers who stood firm, are saddened by one grief: that the violent enemy has torn away and cast down a part of our own inward parts in the slaughter of his devastation. What shall I do here, dearest brothers, tossed by the varied surge of my mind? What or how shall I speak? Tears rather than words are needed to express the grief with which the wound of our body must be wept over, with which the manifold loss of a people once numerous must be lamented. For who is so hard and iron-hearted, who so forgetful of brotherly love, that, standing amid the manifold ruins of his own and their mournful remains disfigured with much squalor, he could keep his eyes dry and not, with weeping bursting out at once, pour out his groans in tears rather than in voice? I grieve, brothers, I grieve with you; nor does my own integrity and private soundness beguile me into softening my griefs, since a shepherd is wounded more in the wound of his flock. I join my heart with each one; I share the mournful weights of sorrow and death. I lament with those who lament, I weep with those who weep, I think myself fallen with those who have fallen. My own limbs were struck at the same time by those darts of the rampaging enemy; his savage swords passed through my own inward parts. The mind cannot have been immune and free from the onset of persecution: in my fallen brothers my affection has laid me low too.