Poems

It is indeed an insult to offer something earthly and rustic to a householder who abounds in the delicacies of the sea; but so that I might have a reason for saying something to your oneness of heart, and might seem to attach some courtesy to this message, I have sent a few fig-peckers out of the very few that the boys bring in at evening. Since I blushed at how few they were, I have added more words besides in little verses, as if I meant to make up the number by talkativeness. But since both are blameworthy, you, by pardoning both kindly and as a friend, will see to it that neither the fewness seems ungracious nor the chatter tiresome.

Take, then, these birds fed in the brambly countryside, which the cunning fowler, lurking under a covering of fern, while he imitates birds and deceives them with a like whisper, hangs up, a trusting troop, on limed twigs. Then, bringing back a slender prey as no small gift, he sets out his catch on boards; and the first row gleams with the plump ones, thinning by degrees toward the bottom of the board. So that leanness may give less offense, the charm of the fattened birds, set in front, pleases eyes that the plump bird has first won over.

That the gift of a poor friend may please you as dear, do not reckon up the rich gifts that you send us. For what worthy return can I make you for those fish which the neighbouring shore supplies you from its wealthy waters, marvellous and distinct in look and shape? But for me, scarcely, in the shallows over the rocky deep, is a rare sphondylus born in the dark seaweed. Sharing from this, I have sent you twice five and twice three shells, fragrant with the nectar of the sea, which their very sweet flesh fills with a two-coloured marrow. I pray you, take them gladly and do not scorn humble things, which are small in measure but measured by great love.

Europe and Asia, the two greatest members of the earth (to which Sallust doubtfully adds Libya as joined to Europe, though it might be called a third), ruled by many whom fame blots out, and whose barbarian names the Roman tongue does not hand down: Illibanus, and the Numidian Avelis, and the Parthian Vonones, and Caranus, who gave the names of kings to Pella, and Nechepsos, who taught the magi vain mysteries, and he who reigned without a name, and soon Sesostris. … he who boldly gave a name to the Icarian sea, and he who with measured flight swam out to the Chalcidian citadels.

Almighty Begetter of all things, who hold supreme power, hear me, if I pray for what is just: let no day be gloomy for me, let no night break my peaceful rest. Let others' goods not please me; rather, let mine be of use to those who ask; let no one have prayers to harm me, or let him have nothing that could harm. Let there be no means of willing ill, and let there be a tranquil power of doing good. Let a mind content with its own, not given to shameful gain, well conscious of a chaste bed, overcome the enticements of the body; and let it hate shameful jests and obscene words, and that guilty tongue, most welcome to malicious ears, ever pouring out its poison. Let me not be afflicted at anyone's death, nor grow rich by a funeral. May I never envy anyone, nor ever lie. Let there be a happy household, and at a feast of unbought food let a well-fed home-born slave play, and a faithful companion, and a neat attendant, and a compliant wife, and dear children from that wife. These things God grants to chaste ways; these ways promise themselves everlasting life in the ages to come.

Supreme Father of all things and eternal power of heaven, and you, Christ, with whom are our salvation and the glory of the saints, and Spirit, joined equally with the Father and the Son, you who rule minds and tongues and supply the strength which faith alone has earned, you who have full power to pour understanding into brute beasts and voice into the mute, grant that John, drawn from the fountain of the gospel, may run down into my songs in a dry stream. He indeed is as great a gift as could be given to the world by him who commanded such a one to be born through new miracles; but it is allowed to spend slight pains on great things, and heavenly things do not disdain humble praise. It is even a share of merit to celebrate the merit of the godly; nor shall I sing now of things new or my own: the prophets told all things beforehand, and holy men in prose made sacred his promised birth, his life and his death, if that was death which earned heaven by blood. I have only vowed to unfold their sayings in tuneful measures and to refresh the minds of readers with verse. So (for it is allowed to compare great things with small, old with new, perfect with unlearned, eternal with perishing), by God's inspiration, whatever earlier men had said David, that venerable name, fitted to the lyre, composing harmonious melodies with a heavenly plectrum. For us too it is right to remember God, and, though our breasts are buried under many sins, to admit a heavenly understanding. Zechariah, once a priest of the Syrian race, cared for the temple entrusted to him with solemn ritual. The man's life, in godliness, faith, gravity, modesty, and obedience, was worthy of God; he had a kindly wife, Elizabeth, born of an ancient stock of holy men, and equal in virtues to so great a husband.

But, what earlier generations counted a reproach to mothers, lacking offspring she led a sorrowful, barren old age, and her years, now past, had shut out all hope of children. It happened that all the people were bringing a solemn offering to God, and the godly high priest had kindled the sacred fires, adorning the inner altar with divine flames; behold, a heavenly messenger stood beside the sacred altar, and, distinguished in dress, venerable in face, proved by his look and bearing that he was sent from heaven; then he opened his holy breast in words like these: “Receive, O priest beloved of the heavenly Lord, the commands of the eternal God, whose care for the godly is perpetual, who, a constant guardian in a pure breast, has known how to bestow on the saints a love they have earned. And first, he does not wish your family to perish here with its seed extinguished, and he has made fruitful the womb of your wife, who was already ceasing in her worn-out age. Why, though, do you also doubt, with a mortal mind, that God can do all things? But you shall believe; he will prove it. There will be born, worthy of so great a guarantor, a blessed and everlasting boy, who from his very first years will hold, beyond his age, sacred strength in an unconquered breast, more by the gift of his Maker than of his begetter. Nor indeed is it your choice or right what first name you give your son; God himself, assuredly, who commands that he be born, commands also that he be John. This title of his name, an immense extension of his merits, he alone could foreknow before he was born who will give him and will grant you joy in so great a son. Nor will he grant it to you alone; glory is small when shut within one house; but as far as the world stretches from the east to the bounded twilight of the late light, the whole world will rejoice with you in your offspring.

What wonder? He will be free of all the dregs of vices, leading a heavenly life without stain or crime, keeping his breast abstinent from maddening wine and avoiding every cup of evil-counselling juice; and though he will promise salvation to the human race, even after its errors, to whoever is renewed by the holy water, he himself will have nothing in himself to be purified. And not to tell you more by varied windings: being a learned priest, you cannot be ignorant of the merit of Elijah, who, released from the law of hateful death, lives an eternal life with his own body, whom a fiery chariot carried to the lofty heaven, borne along by the swift effort of flaming horses; your son will equal him in the pedigree of his merits and will have just as much both of praise and of virtue. So, as fitting thanks for so great a gift, do not keep your faith in suspense, lest the anger of a favouring God, roused, should set a deserved penalty after the rewards.” So he spoke, and winged he glided away into the thin air and filled the air far around with a sacred fragrance. The priest stiffened, confused, with a trembling mind, and while his hesitant heart turned the promise over, while he distrusted that he had earned so great a favour, that he should be the care of the most high God, that a messenger sent down from high heaven should bring to a servant such clear commands from his Lord, and while he fears he is being mocked and thinks it all a dream, while he rates his own character more sparingly than is right and will not own that he has earned it, faith itself makes him faithless; while he will not believe himself worthy, he earns punishment by unbelief.

At once the tongue of the doubter was bound fast to his palate, and, forgetting its own movement, and attempting to shape the sound of the voice, it clung in sluggish numbness, and while he longed to tell his people of the miracles, he strove in vain and was struck dumb, his mouth fixed. He went away sorrowful, turning over the grief shut within his mind, and in his secret heart prayed pardon for his errors. How great is God's kindness, and how easily entreated his divinity! It is enough to have repented. The order of time that brings fulfilment rolls on, and (a wonder) Elizabeth swells with a pregnant womb, and her godly womb carries a holy weight, and a gift of youth comes in a worn-out age. Then holy Gabriel, who had been the same messenger to Zechariah, turning over far greater matters, sets out on another journey, to Mary, who, betrothed to a husband but rather chosen by God to bear the salvation of the world, a chaste virgin, kept her modesty unblemished. When he, distinguished in a form of heavenly beauty, stood before her eyes, she lowered her modest face and her cheeks reddened with a rush of blood. He said: “O maiden, more blessed than all virgins in the world which the sun's circle surrounds, that were before, that are, that shall follow hereafter, chosen by the great God, so that you may be called the mother of him whose Father he also is! Come, happy one, conceive a weight, undefiled by a man and free of all intercourse, made fruitful by the Word of God; let your womb furnish a body for him who made heaven, earth, sea, and stars, who always was, and now is, and in all time will always be the Lord of the world and the creator of light. And he, the very light of heaven, will through you put on mortal limbs and come under the eyes and into the company of men.

Take up a mind undisturbed for the rewards of such great praise; he will give you strength and faith, who has willed (for he rules all things and governs them by his nod) to be your son, though he was the Son of the Lord.” He had spoken, and left at once both her sight and the earth, and with easy effort sought the heaven he was used to. God's commands were fulfilled, and the maiden believed at once, and her ready faith increased her merit and her former life. Hidden elements, by silent causes, form the divine body, and the burden to be hallowed grows; the godly womb cherishes the heavenly Lord. Meanwhile her offspring, though not yet born, urges holy Mary, pregnant, to go out and visit Elizabeth, who, now venerable with long age, was carrying a boy beloved by the Lord, soon to be born. The mother listens to her son (so great is the power of faith) and comes where she is bidden; John stirred his mother's womb and filled her breast with divine understanding. Already a seer though not yet born, shut in the womb, already a prophet, he saw things done before and things to come. When she saw Mary from afar, shining with the light she had conceived, she hurried forward with quick step to meet her, and, reverently stretching out her arms, said: “Hail, O mother of the Lord, hail, godly virgin, free of the marriage bed and knowing no man's union, yet to bear God; so much was it worth to be chaste, that untouched you should bear the titles and rewards of a bride. Why is the honour of this service brought to me, undeserving and unworthy of so great a gift? Why does the glory of heaven, brought into our household and humble roof, carry so great a light into our obscure inner rooms?

But may he be gentle and peaceful to those who worship him, and, once born, grant the favour he has granted before.” She spoke, and clasped her in the embrace of her arms, and, already worshipping God, gave kisses to the godly womb. Come, tell me now, guilty Judea, stained with the blood of your king: if no faith is to be given to the words of earlier men, if you believe that the holy prophets deceive, and Moses himself, if the impious harshness of a perverse nation thinks that David deceives, believe those not yet born; shut in his mother's womb, John teaches through his mother's holy mouth what he sees. Who, I ask, taught him whom the virgin held in her chaste womb, how great a birth awaits the new ages? But hidden things lie open to the holy, and are not seen by the profane. But my wheel has left its track and seeks the broad plains, and, forgetting me, dares to run on too far. I hope there will be a time when, with strengthened power, I may someday drive a strong four-horse team across this field too. Now let us take up again the journey we began; let a mortal page tell mortal things; let divine writings speak of the Lord. And now, the time being completed, as much as nature required, the famous boy was born from a ripe womb, and sure faith fulfilled God's great promises, which, not believed, had brought punishment, and the infant once born proved them. The relatives gathered, coming as is the custom, to fit the boy with a name drawn from the names of ancestors, sought out by comparing reasons; but the mother, aware of the heavenly command through her son, says that the choice has not been left to relatives. So they resolve to consult the father, long silent with his voice shut off; the only means of bringing out the sign the tongue cannot give is if a letter marks it.

He is consulted; he takes the tablets and writes “John.” All marvel, and recall that no one among the earlier ancestors of the family had had this name before. How much faith, though late, availed! Because his right hand marked what his mind had believed, the punishment of his sin was remitted. The bars of his bound tongue were loosed and opened; the old man now answers with his voice and discloses to his relatives the commands of God long hidden, and promises the future while he proves the past. Who would doubt that he would be such a one, whom he saw could be born by the Lord's command, by an unusual birth, with the law of nature set aside? Both the father's punishment and his pardon set before the eyes of all an example of unbelief to be told by all, and fear presses on minds from one side, hope from the other. Meanwhile the time of the cradle slips by; even in it a clear appearance of divine vigour stands out. Coaxings and laughter are silent, uncertain babblings cease; a seriousness that runs ahead of playful sense already shapes his tender face for the character to come. Then, when the boy had planted his first steps with steady effort and words had marked out sure speech, it was his custom either to listen to the sayings of his holy father, or to learn by heart the famous deeds of the ancients, or the laws which God himself had established through Moses as interpreter, which the page of sacred stone preserves. These things, and others that might strengthen his tender mind, he handled and went over again; for he is not to be thought ignorant of the past, to whom the Lord had given to know the future. But after strength came to his limbs with age (for his mind, full of God, had outrun his slow years), he then resolved that he must learn what men cannot teach, and at the same time flee the contagions of food and drink, harmful to a holy life.

So he leaves the house of his holy father, though spotless, and flees the crowds of men and their guilty gatherings, and makes for lonely lands, for trackless places, in which his undefiled mind might see only itself and, free from cares, give itself to sacred precepts. His clothing was woven of the bristles of the humped camel, so that against luxury he might harden his soft limbs and, with his body pricked, keep off heavy sleep. A cheap girdle bound it round his rigid loins. Wild honey supplied his easy food, and fruits, and herbs sprung up on untilled rocks, and running water relieved his parched thirst. What room is there here for vices? What entrance has wicked desire found among these things into the inner sanctuary of the holy mind? Wherein can he sin who desires nothing? How can he tend toward the hiding places of wrong feeling who lacks nothing? So lived the first men, and when the world was new the Maker had given them these ways for the ages to come, until evil-counselling pleasure thrust itself in and brought luxury with it and the love of possession. Hence hatreds, hence quarrels, hence fraud, hence envy and anger, slaughter, arms, blood, conflict, battles, deaths; hence the offense against God, which savage Tartarus will expiate. But why do I rebuke too much the common faults, forgetful of myself, whom it befits not to burden others with misdeeds but to hope for pardon? Rather we shall more rightly marvel at the unconquered example, which no one in the old age could imitate, of a man who surpassed human limits by toil, a half-divine man, who, free from every stain, though he tormented his body with such harsh penalties, laid down what befits us, even after sins.

But after, strengthening his unconquered mind through such things, he had spent a long time and had settled as found the things that were to be sought, a voice came to him from heaven: “Enough time has now been spent, beloved prophet, in which you have profited yourself; it is time that the gifts you know were given you should profit others and save what is already lost. Go, then, to the holy waters of the pure Jordan. There whoever among men repents of the misdeeds of his former life and at last turns over better things in his mind, wash him, once he has confessed; whoever with faithful mind believes you that misdeeds are blotted out by the godly washing, he shall be reborn, if only such a life follows as proves that the washed have condemned their former life.” John obeyed what he heard with a servant's mind at once, and went down to the banks of the river as commanded. Here he preaches God's precepts with awe-inspiring speech and pours new salvation into the hearts of believers. He washes away the crimes of believers with the waters poured on them, and frees men from fears and remits penalties, and quenches fire with water, urges forgetfulness of errors, and furnishes new bodies for a new life. O Father, O eternal creator of men and of things, by how many steps your kindness spares! What father ever bears to forgive a straying son so often? You give the race understanding, by which they may know good and evil. Not enough: you bind on them the bonds of a law to be kept, and set out penalties for the wicked and rewards for the just. Whoever has scorned these too, let him return whenever he pleases; pardon is at hand; see, the holy washing lies open, which renews life and blots out old deeds and makes men new. What more do we seek?

And yet there is a further pardon, if anyone, having fallen, violates this gift too with a polluted body. Although his error has already gone very far, let him stop and return. When he has condemned himself, he has earned absolution; if he repents, the guilt is void. O truly, as you say, the burden is light, and the yoke that is fastened on is sweet, when one man is forgiven so often; and yet we stray, and there is no end of crime for the human race. But your praise grows; for the greater the guilt of the accused, the greater the glory of the one who spares. So let every mind return thanks to you, and every tongue sing, and as far as the human race can, if it cannot please, let it at least labour to be grateful. An immense deep lies open, if we spread our sails, for your praises, kind Father; but my mind, aware of so great a burden, trembles, and, not unaware of its own strength, takes counsel and leaves what must be said to worthier men. Let us return to what we began: this work is yours, holy John, by which you renew pure minds when the body is washed. It was not first given by that word of the Lord by which he admonished you, sending a clear voice through the clouds; many ages earlier God had spoken by the mouth of the holy prophet Isaiah, the greatest of the old age: “I will send before your eyes, O Son, a servant, who, clearing the tangles of thorny paths, will make lofty mountains sink down before your steps and will likewise make low valleys rise up; he will make straight what is crooked and smooth the rough, will soften the hard, and will force the whole world to become level.” Is it you, I pray, gift of the most high Father, kindly John, promised together with Christ, who come, and does he count you as his own, he who sent his Son? Are you, O you foretold by the prophets, the one who shares the honour of the angelic name?

Through you the mercy of God first shows itself; to you was first granted the power of giving pardon. When the crowds of the new people sought many miracles, Christ said of you: “It has been granted to see such a prophet as no ages before have seen. I tell you, I who alone know what has been done and what is to be done: among the children whom woman has borne to mortals, and whom she will bear, created in the usual way of men, there will be none who can be preferred to John.” This is what he says of you who sees through every inmost part of the human heart and all the stretches of the ages in order, as we see what is set before our eyes.

Blessed is he who has set his life far apart from the gatherings of the impious, and has not stayed in the way of sinners, nor sat in the pestilent chair, but, fixed with his whole heart on the law of God, has turned over its precepts of life by night and by day and cultivates his mind with chaste teachings. He will be like a tree which, near the river, is fed by the moisture that nourishes the bank, and, full, will yield its fruit in its season, and, ever green with leaves that never fall, will stand, a living wood with everlasting foliage. This glory will not attend the wicked; but as the wind snatches the ash of dust, so wrath will sweep the wicked from the face of God. Therefore the flocks of men scattered over the world will be divided in this order: the impious, who denied God the worship due to him, will not rise again to be judged, but to be punished; for evident crime will need no inquiry to uncover it, since they will show the mark of impending death, not bearing on their foreheads the sign of salvation. But the sinner who is not, however, also impious, and these are a great crowd, will not rise to glory, but will rise to be assigned to examination. For he cannot sit as judge with the godly, since he is to render account of his own acts and, according to his varied deeds, be either approved or found guilty. Those ignorant of the law will fall everywhere without law; he who has fallen under the law will be judged by the law. The fire will run through every work as arbiter;

what the flame has not burned up but tested will be repaid with an everlasting reward. He who has done things fit to be burned will suffer loss, but he himself will fly out of the fires saved; yet, wretched, with the marks of his scorched body, he will keep life; he will not keep glory. Because, overcome by the flesh yet not turned away in mind, even if he has refused the law the faith he owed it, often rolling down through many crimes, yet bearing the eternal name of faith, he will never be exiled from the bounds of salvation. Therefore let all of us now in this age, while time runs and the day of life lies open, walk straight paths with firm foot and not be carried down the slippery broad road; it is better, struggling along the narrow track, to enter by toilsome efforts. God gladly acknowledges the ways of the good, but the downhill road of the impious will be destroyed.

Why did the nations rage, and why did the peoples devise vain things? The chiefs, driven along with the kings, took their stand against the Lord and his Christ, raging madly: “Let us break their chains, let us shake off their yokes.” He who abides with eternal governance over all the heavens will laugh at them and speak in just anger, and threatening with a terrible word will confound the wicked: “But I, made king by him with equal dominion, proclaim the Lord's precept upon kindly Zion.” The Lord himself said to me: “You are my Son, and today I have begotten you. Ask; be my heir among the nations, and let your possession be established in all lands. You have a rod of iron, because by mighty right you rule the swelling peoples in the whole world, breaking hearts like vessels shaped from clay, that you may re-form them better, fired anew.” And now, behold, all you kings, give heed with humbled minds, and whoever among men govern servant hearts by judgment and hold the reins of affairs: serve God trembling, and, faithful, rejoice with fear mixed in; let there be a harmonious discord, uniting unlike feelings in one breast, so that fear may not crush minds nor joys dissolve them, if, fearful through dread of death, they should lack joy. Speak justice and take up upright ways, and tremble before God as just, rejoice in him as kind, lest at any time God be angry with a world that deserves it, and you, driven from the just way, justly perish. From now on hasten to leap back from the unjust way; behold, when shortly the great anger of the Mighty One has blazed up, so that he winnows the whole world with divine sifting and separates the chaff for the fire, the grain for salvation, then all who have a faithful hope in him will be blessed.

We sat by the unknown rivers of dread Babylon, captives, a band of Judah, weeping piteously, as we drew our fathers' Zion with remembering heart and sighed over an exile deserved by just wrath, where the bank, planted with pliant willows, offered friendly shade to the peoples who were its guests. There, within the walls of the Assyrian city, forgetting joyful sounds in sorrowful silence, we hung our instruments on the branches of the willows. For heavy wrath gave us hard grief, because that impious enemy who had led us away from home commanded us to sing for his pleasure these songs that used to be poured out in the holy temple. Shall we then sing the divine praises and songs fit for chaste choirs amid barbarous rites and foul tombs and among altars kindled with deadly fires, alas, to those wrongly glad at our grief, and make wicked luxury out of godly ritual, setting mystic songs to an enemy's sport? With what mouth shall we wretched sing sacred hymns now? In what place does Babylon demand for itself the songs of Zion? But a foreign land cannot deserve the song of the Lord; the sacred voice turns away from unworthy ears. Yet if, as a more violent master, you press upon captives, and if you have so great a love of knowing the godly songs of Zion, if you go on forcing me to speak what is not yours and to tell you what the divine songs of Zion are, hear what God the avenger promises the captured city, so that you may not hope to rejoice long in that triumph, impious one, by which you order the sacred hymn to be brought out for you; behold, what the hymn of the Lord is, what the songs of Zion are:

“If I forget my walls, you, my care, city of Jerusalem, may my right hand never remember me, and may my tongue cling dry to my throat, unless I embrace you with eternal love, and unless, at the beginning of the kingdom promised for the ages and in the first year of my joy, I remember to set you, Jerusalem, before all lands. Remember then the children of Edom, so that, the tables turned, confounded, they may behold our day, when your people will inhabit glorious Jerusalem with eternal walls, against which a race forgetful of you now threatens cruel destruction, saying: ‘Tear down utterly the hated city and empty it by force, until no traces are left, the walls reduced to nothing.’ Unhappy daughter of wretched Babylon, happy is he who shall repay you on our behalf for your deeds against us. Nor will he be less blessed who will seize your little ones and at once dash your offspring against the solid rock.” If you desire to be blessed by extinguishing Babylon's stock, break by faith the sins that swell within you in their first flames. The rock, Christ, is at hand; on him dash the viper's brood with strong arms. For Babylon's name means confusion; her daughter is the flesh, mother of sins, a crowd harmful to salvation, which draws evil seeds through the fibres of the body. These you must conquer, if you wish to conquer death; for such enemies shut up in your bones, if they are allowed to gain strength by growing, you will conquer only with a hard struggle; seize them while small, while the infancy of vices, raw from the womb of the heart, still creeps with tender limbs through the captured breast. Unless you forestall them, the earthly offspring, grown in strength, will kill the soul that agrees with the vices. So do not spare to slay such a troop. It will be no crime for you to destroy a race that would harm you and to drench the avenging rock with evil blood; for the just man rejoices if the impious offspring falls; for the godly man is more and more cleansed by this slaughter, if he kills the sins that rule in his members and, the people of vices broken in Christ, triumphs.

This is now the fourth summer returning for the hard-working reapers, and as often has winter stiffened with white frost, since any letter came to me from your lips, since I saw any writing marked by your hand, until at last a happy sheet, with a welcome little book, gave me gifts long denied, multiplied. For a threefold letter flowered with varied texture, but the threefold page was a poem in many measures. Anxious affection had mixed certain sweet things beneath bitter ones, in complaints of many kinds of censure. But it is the gentleness of a father, more than the bitterness of a censor, that has settled with me, and I weigh the harsh things by the kind. Those things, however, must be answered in their own place and handled with the weightier sound of the avenging hexameter. Meanwhile the lighter iambus will run ahead in a few lines, returning words in exchange in its distinct foot. Now the elegiacs bid you hail, and, the greeting spoken, having made the opening and the step for the others, fall silent. Why, father, do you bid the Muses, whom I have renounced, to return to my care? Hearts dedicated to Christ refuse the Camenae and are not open to Apollo. Once there was this harmony between you and me, not of equal power but of equal zeal: to rouse deaf Phoebus from his Delphic cave, to call on the Muses as deities, and to seek from groves or ridges the gift of speech, which is granted by the gift of God. Now another power drives my mind, a greater God, and demands other ways, claiming back for himself from man his own gift, that we may live for the Father of life.

He forbids us to be free for vain things, in leisure or in business, and for the literature of fables, so that we may obey his laws and see his light, which the cunning force of the philosophers, the art of rhetoricians, and the fictions of the poets cloud over, who steep hearts in false and vain things and train only tongues, bringing nothing that might confer salvation or cover us with truth. For what good or true thing can they hold who do not hold the head of the highest, God, the kindling and the fountain of the true and the good, whom no one sees except in Christ? He is the light of truth, the way of life, the power, mind, hand, and strength of the Father, the sun of justice, the fountain of good things, the flower of God, born of God, sower of the world, the life of our mortality and the death of death; he is the master of the virtues; God for us and man on our behalf, he stripped himself by putting us on, joining in himself, in both natures, eternal exchanges between men and God. So when he has darted his own radiance from heaven into our hearts, he wipes away the sick mould of the sluggish body and renews the condition of the mind; he drains out all that used to please before, in exchange for chaste pleasure, and by the Lord's right wholly claims our hearts and lips and times;

he wills to be thought of, understood, believed, read; he wills to be feared and loved. The empty surges which the toil of life stirs along the path of the present age are abolished by faith in the future life with God. That faith does not cast away the riches which we seem to scorn as profane or worthless, but counsels that, as dearer, they be stored in heaven, entrusted to Christ God, who has promised more than what is given, so that what is scorned, or rather deposited with him, in the present he may repay with much interest. A guardian without fraud, a good debtor, he will return increased sums to his creditors, and God, more generous, will restore with much usury the money that was scorned. So do not, I pray, think me sluggish or perverse if I am free for him, or study him and am devoted to him, storing up all things in him, nor accuse me of impiety. How can piety be absent from a Christian? For being a Christian is the proof of piety, and not being subject to Christ is the proof of the impious, each of the other. When we learn to hold this, can I fail to show it to you, that is, to a father, to whom God willed that I should owe all holy rights and dear names? To you I owe my learning, rank, letters, the glory of tongue, toga, and fame, advanced, raised up, instructed by you, my patron, teacher, father.

But why do you charge me with living so long far away, and grow angry with a loving emotion? Either it is useful, or it is necessary, or it pleases me; whichever of these is in it is pardonable. Forgive me, loving one, if I do what is good for me; congratulate me, if I live as I please. That I have been away from my native land for three whole years and, wandering astray, have chosen another world, forgetful of the fellowship of your life which I once cultivated, you rebuke me with holy complaints, moved by affection. I embrace these emotions, worthy of reverence, from a father's heart, and your anger, which I must welcome with my affection unharmed. But I would rather, father, that you sought my return from where it could be granted. Am I to believe I shall be called back to you when you pour out barren prayers, not to the divine, but as a suppliant to the Castalian Muses, with heaven turned away? Not by these deities do you bring me back to you and to my country. You call on deaf things and ask from nothing (a light breeze will carry off what is given into nothing): the Muses, names without divinity. The windy storms snatch away these useless prayers, which, not sent to God, cling to the empty clouds and do not reach the starry hall of the King above. If you care about my return, look to him and pray to him who with thunder shakes the fiery heights of highest heaven, who flashes with three-forked fire and mingles no empty rumblings, and who from heaven bestows suns and rains on the sown fields, who, above all that is, and wholly everywhere in all, rules all things through Christ, poured into all things, through whom he holds and moves minds, through whom he disposes our times and places. But if he should ordain things contrary to our wishes, he must be bent by prayer to what we want. Why do you accuse me? If the course I follow, God driving me, displeases you, then, if it is lawful to say so, the author is the first defendant, whose pleasure it is either to form or to turn my thoughts.

For if you reckon my former ways, those known to you, I will freely confess that I am not now the man I was at that time, when I was not thought perverse and was perverse, seeing through the fog of falsehood, wise in what is foolish to God, and living on the food of death. So it is all the more right that I be pardoned, because from this it is more readily granted to recognize that I am renewed by the highest Father, since what is done is not done in my own way. I shall not, I think, be said to have confessed here a branded error of a mind changed for the worse, since I have freely professed that I did not change my former life by my own mind. A new mind is mine, I confess, a mind not mine, once not mine, but mine now by God's authorship; and if he has seen anything in my conduct or character worthy of his service, the first thanks go to you, the glory due goes to you, by whose teaching was produced what Christ might love. So you have more cause to congratulate than to complain that your Paulinus, born of your studies and your character, whose parent you do not deny you are, has now, though you believe him perverse, so turned his counsels that he has earned the right to be Christ's while he remains Ausonius's; he will bring his rewards to your praise and will offer you the first fruit from your own tree. So I pray you to think better things, and not to lose the greatest rewards by cursing good things that sprang from your own fountains.

For I do not have a mad mind, nor do I live the fugitive life that shuns the company of men, as you write that the rider of Pegasus lived in the caves of Lycia; even though many dwell in pathless places under God's prompting, as famous philosophers did before for the sake of their studies and their Muses, and as now also those who have taken up Christ with chaste minds often do, not poor in mind, nor choosing out of wildness to live in deserted places, but turned to the lofty stars, beholding God, and intent on looking into the depths of truth; they love leisure free from vain cares and shrink from the din of the forum and the tumult of affairs and all business hostile to divine gifts, out of regard for Christ's commands and love of salvation, and with hope and faith follow God for the promised reward, which the sure Author will pay to those who do not despair, if only present things do not prevail with their empty goods, and the mind scorns what it sees, that it may earn what it does not see, its fiery sense penetrating heavenly secrets. For perishable things lie open to our sight, eternal things are denied to our eyes, and now we follow in hope what we see with the mind, scorning the varied forms, the spectacles of things, and the goods that wrongly solicit the bodily eyes. Yet this judgment seemed settled to those to whom the whole light of the true and the good has already opened: the eternity of the age to come and the emptiness of the present. But why should I, who do not have the same glory, have the same reputation? A known man's report is equally believed; but since I now still live in pleasant and charming places, settled on the shore of a wealthy coast, whence comes this hasty envy of my places? Would that a just envy would begin to pluck at me: under the name of Christ reproaches will please me.

A mind firm in God does not allow a tender sense of shame, and praise scorned here returns to me with Christ as judge. So do not, revered parent, rebuke me as wrongly turned to these pursuits, nor carp at me for my wife or for a fault of mind; mine is not the anxious mind of Bellerophon, nor is my wife a Tanaquil, but a Lucretia. Nor do I seem now to have forgotten my native heaven, I who look up to the highest Father; whoever worships him alone here truly remembers heaven. Believe then, father, that we are neither forgetful of heaven nor living without mind, and that we spend our lives in places where men live; the very pursuits of the godly bear witness to the characters of men; for an impious people will not be able to know the highest God. Granted that many places, many, are untilled by men's pursuits, without laws: what region lacks rustic custom? Or what harm does the wickedness of others do in such places? Why do you cast up to me the wild forests of Vasconia and the snowy lodgings of the Pyrenees, as if I lived fixed at the very first threshold of the Spanish region, and had no place anywhere in country or city, where rich Spain lies open all the way to the edge of the world, beholding the setting suns? But suppose it was my lot to have lived on robbers' ridges: did I grow wild by a barbarian hearth, changed into those very people among whom I had settlers sharing their savagery? A pure mind does not admit evil, nor do stains sprinkled on light fibres stick; so in a Basque forest whoever leads a life pure of crime, upright, just, draws no contagion of manners from an inhuman host. But why should a charge be laid against me from that name, I who live, as I have lived, in different places, joined to proud cities and thronged with the glad cultivation of men?

And even if I had lived on the Basque coasts, why should the barbarian people not rather be formed by my ways, lay aside their savage rites and pass over into ours? For as to your placing my dwelling in ruined Iberian cities, choosing deserted towns for your verse, and reproaching me with mountainous Calagurris, and Bilbilis hanging on sharp crags, and the hill of fallen Ilerda, as if I lived among them, an exile from house and city, outside the homes and roads of men: do you think, ignorant of the Spanish world, that these are the riches of the Iberian land, where that Atlas stood under the heavy weight of the sky, now its last portion, a mountain and the boundary of the earth, which with its lofty peak shuts off two-sea Calpe? Is this land known only for Bilbilis, Calagurris, Ilerda, the land that has Caesarea Augusta, that has pleasant Barcino, and Tarraco, looking down on the sea from its noble height? Why should I count the cities excellent in lands and walls, where happy Spain stretches toward the twin sea, where it swells the Ocean with the Baetis and the Tyrrhenian with the Ebro and fills the wide divide of the distant seas, setting its own bound at the limit of the world? Or would you, my illustrious lord, if you had a mind to write in what region you live, be pleased to keep silent about shining Burdigala and to describe the pitch-black Boii? And when you spend your leisure lavishly at the baths of Marojalicum and grant yourself to live among shady groves, dwelling in places glad and in houses wonderful under their roofs, do you live in blackened huts and hovels thatched with straw and wilds fit for the skin-clad Bigerri? And you, a powerful consul, who despise the proud walls of Rome, do you not scorn the sandy Vasates?

Or, because your fertile estate grows green in the fields of the Pictones, shall I lament that, alas, the Ausonian curule chair has come down to Rauranum, and that the consular robe grows shabby in an old shrine, that robe which nevertheless, in the august city of Latian Quirinus, shines among the emperors' palm-embroidered robes with equal title, long venerable with unworn gold, keeping the flourishing honour of living merit? Or when you are kept at the summit of your estate at Lucaniacus, living under roofs that rival the halls of Romulus, shall you be said, because the place supplies the material, since it marks what lies nearby, to live in the village of Condate? Let much be open to jests; let it be allowed to play with fictions too. But to strike in a heavy tooth while the tongue soothes, to play with burning flatteries and to leaven ill-sweet jests with the vinegar of biting satire, is often fitting for poets, never for parents. For faith and affection require that what evil rumour, weaving its web, insinuates into chaste ears, the good mind of a father, by its wish, should not allow to be fixed and, once fixed, to cling to the heart. The crowd, malicious with ill-omened rumour, counts it a crime not always to keep one's life to the ways one held before; but to turn for the better deserves praise. When you hear that I am changed, inquire into my pursuit and my duty. If I have changed from right to wrong, from religious to profane, from frugal to luxurious, from honourable to shameful, if I live sluggish, idle, obscure, pity your companion, turned to evil; let anger rouse even a gentle parent to restore his fallen friend to upright ways and to repair better things by stern warning.

But if perhaps you hear likewise what I have chosen and what I follow: that I have vowed my heart to the godly God, following the venerable rule of Christ with teachable belief, and persuaded by God's warnings that eternal rewards are prepared, bought by a mortal with present losses, I do not think that this has so displeased my holy parent that he believes it an error of mind to live for Christ as Christ has ordained. This pleases me, nor do I repent of this error. To seem foolish to those who follow other things I do not mind at all, so long as my judgment is wise to the eternal King. Brief is whatever man is: he is of a sick body, of a setting time, and without Christ dust and shadow; what he approves or condemns is worth as much as the judge himself. He himself dies, and his error goes along with him, and the judgment passes away, dying with its judge. But unless, while the present time is given, we take anxious care to live by the precept of Christ the Lord, too late will be man's complaint when he has put off his limbs that, while he feared the light reproaches of human tongues, he did not fear the heavy anger of the divine Judge, who sits on the throne and at the right hand of the eternal Father, set over all as king, and who, as the years glide by, will come to judge all nations with an even balance and render to their varied deeds their rewards; this I believe indeed, and, fearful, I labour with hastening zeal, if it may be granted, not to be released by death before I am released from sin.

At his coming my believing heart trembles with quivering fibres, and my soul, already wary of the future, is restless, fearing beforehand that, bound to the body by sick cares and heavy with the weights of things, if perhaps the vast trumpet should sound when the sky is opened, it could not raise itself into the air on light wings to meet the King, flying among the honoured thousands of the saints in heaven, who, light through the void, will lift their feet, not bound by the world's fetter, to the lofty stars with easy effort, and, carried on soft clouds, will go through the stars, to worship the heavenly King in the midst of the air and join their bright ranks with the adored Christ. This is my fear, this my labour: that the last day may catch me asleep in black darkness, in barren activity, spending lost times in empty cares. For what shall I do if, while I blink over sluggish prayers, Christ, revealed from his heavenly citadel, flashes upon me, and, dazzled by the sudden rays of the Lord coming from the opened heaven, confounded by the light brought upon me, I seek the sad refuges of dark night? So that neither distrust of the truth nor love of the present life, nor the pleasure of things, nor the labour of cares, might bring this upon me, I have resolved to forestall misfortune by my purpose, and to end my cares while life remains, and, relying on God, who is common to all for the ages to come, to await cruel death with a carefree breast. If this pleases you, rejoice in the rich hope of your friend; if not, leave me to be approved by Christ alone.

You recall that the silence of my tongue has lasted long without a break, and you reproach me with a sloth that delights in hiding, and you add besides the charge of neglected friendship, and throw in my face a wife to be feared, and hurl a harsh verse into my heart. Refrain, I pray, from tearing one who is yours, and do not wish to mix bitter things with fatherly words, like wormwood with honey. It has always been and remains my care to honour you with every duty and to respect you with faithful affection. Never has your favour been stained for me even by the slightest blemish; I always feared to hurt you even by my face or to offend you by a careless expression. And when I approached you reverently, I composed my face more carefully and formed my brow with glad eyes, so that no false suspicion might draw toward my holy parent a cloud gathered even in a silent breast. By this example my household has cherished you and cherishes you, and so great is our agreement in love for you, as great as in worshipping Christ with joined minds. What envy, I ask, has clouded your heart against your own? By what rumour has easy report burst through your godly ears and struck your mind, and, against the old trust proved by affection, stirred new wounds, so that, counselling evil, it should set a gentle parent against his children? But my mind, conscious of unfeigned simplicity, and my duty toward a father I have not neglected, being guiltless, rejects every undeserved charge and does not bear to be grazed by a false accusation, being truly innocent; one is wounded more heavily by an unjust wound when one is as tender to offence as one is free of guilt. You complain that I have shaken off the yoke by which I was joined to you in learned studies. I assert that I never even bore it; for equals go under yokes; no one couples the strong with the weak, nor are reins in harmony if the measure of the yoked pair is unequal.

If you match a calf with a bull or a horse with a wild ass, if you compare coots with swans and the nightingale with the magpie, hazels with chestnuts, if you make viburnums equal to cypresses, then set me beside you; scarcely could Tully and Maro bear an equal yoke with you. If I am joined to you in love, in this alone will I dare to boast that I am your yoke-mate: that sweet friendship, with its reins, draws the small along with the great, in an eternal bond between me and you, always equal in its laws of returning love. This yoke no sinister tale has loosed from my neck, no long absence has severed in the lands, nor will it destroy it. Though I be drawn away over the whole world or for all time, I shall never live divided from you in mind; sooner will life itself depart from my body than your face from my breast. Through all the age that is given and appointed to mortals, as long as I am held in the enclosing body, in whatever part of the world I am separated from you, not far off, nor removed from my sight, I shall hold you, planted in my fibres; I shall see you with my heart, embrace you with a loving mind, present to me everywhere. And when, freed from the prison of the body, I have flown forth from the earth, in whatever region of heaven the common Father places me, there too I shall bear you in my soul. Nor will the same end that releases me from my body release me from my love for you. For the mind, which, surviving the fallen limbs, endures from its heavenly stock, must keep its feelings and affections as it keeps its life; and as it cannot die, so it cannot forget, ever living and remembering.

Famous confessor, Felix by merit and by name, mind mighty in piety, mind dwelling in highest heaven, and no less a power experienced in all the lands, who, confessing Christ the Lord with unfettered voice, earned by scorning them to escape savage punishments, and, bidden to give back to Christ a soul devoted through all torments, your limbs released of their own accord, left the raging lictors your empty limbs, carried to heavenly honour, a martyr without blood: O father, O lord, though we are unworthy, nod assent to your servants, that at last, while we drag out this life in a frail body, we may celebrate this day in the longed-for dwelling and in the hall where you rest, pay our godly vows in your presence, and rejoice among the rejoicing throngs. Let it now be enough, I pray, to have borne this punishment for deserved impiety, that we have lived so many years without you, far, alas, from your dwelling, though not removed in mind. Now take thought for desires wearied by an immense time, now, though late, remember and pity your own, and through the world, which divides us by so wide an expanse of the great sea, crush what hostilely holds us back and open easy ways; and if the envious enemy stands in the way of those hastening to you, drive back the barriers he throws up, stronger than adversaries, and speed a friendly course. If a land journey pleases, be a companion on a safe road to your own; or if great trust in you persuades us to go by the long sea, grant us to run on gentle waves, and supply servant winds from the stern for your servants, so that, brought at once to the Campanian shores, with Christ as guide, we may soon be swept with eager course to your roof, and in your threshold there may be a calm harbour for us. There we shall bear a sweet yoke, a light burden, a pleasant servitude under you as lord; though, being just, you need no unjust servants, yet you will suffer and love such as we are, dedicated to you by Christ's gift, and allow us to serve at your doors, to care for your thresholds in the morning with cleaning, and by night in turn to guard them with godly vigils, and in this service to close a life spent, with a wearied body.

Felix, rightly so by name and likewise so by merit as by name, the kindly day returns on which Christ took you, a confessor, into the supreme hall of the fatherland; the time is here to pour out thanks to you with full prayers. O father, O lord, best one, though to unworthy servants, at last it has been granted to our prayers to celebrate your birthday within your thresholds. Three lustra have run their long course since, at these solemnities, I dedicated my vows to you in your presence, and my heart. Since then, what labours by land and sea have kept me far from your dwelling in a distant world, you know; for I always called on you as near me everywhere, amid the hardships of the road and the uncertainties of life. And I entered the seas with you as guide, because care for danger gave way to love of you; nor was I without you; for I felt your protection in Christ the Lord as I overcame the roughness of the sea; always, because of you, I am safe on land and wave. Ask, I pray, that this day be serene for your own with eternal kindness and peace from him by whose great name you stand, Felix. Now it delights to let our minds overflow in joy, since the dear day has at last dawned here for us who are present, the day which we always celebrated in a foreign world, the day that consecrated you to the earth and brought you to the stars. Behold, the many-coloured people paint the roads with varied columns; we marvel at countless cities in one city. O Nola, happy in your Felix as patron, famous for your holy citizen, made firm by a heavenly patron, and, after Rome herself, allotted the second titles, Rome which before was first of the earth only by empire and victorious arms, and now also by the tombs of the apostles! Be kind, O Felix, and propitious to your own, and entreat the mighty Lord that by the gift of Christ appeased, after the waves of the sea and the waves of the world have been passed, we may come to rest at your anchorage, in a calm harbour. On this shore I have tied up my fleet, drawn well ashore; in you let the anchor of my settled life be fixed.

The festal day has come, celebrated in heaven, thronged on earth, keeping the birthday of Felix, on which he died to the earth in body and was born to Christ among the stars above, gaining heavenly honour, a martyr without blood. For the confessor died having escaped his punishments not by his own will, God accepting a faithful mind instead of blood, God who, the searcher of the silent heart, makes those ready to bear equal to those who suffered, and, content to have proved the inner man, in just kindness remits the punishment of the flesh; martyrdom without slaughter pleases him, if a mind and faith ready to bear glow before God; the will to suffer suffices and is the highest testimony of known merit. So this is the day, with holy solemnities, which by so great a gift established Felix on high in heaven: after the solstice in which Christ, born in the body, changed the season of icy winter with a new sun, and, giving a saving birth to mortals, ordered the nights to wane along with him as the day advanced, the twentieth light that dawns for us from it marks the starry honour of Felix's merit. Finally, in no way unequal to those witnesses who shed their blood, he shows the merit of a martyr, received in title and in power alike, when with mighty right he drives out demons and frees bound bodies. For the pestilent chiefs confess with gloomy cries that Felix is pressing upon them with unseen punishments, and with open groans testify to hidden torments, and they reveal him, veiled from mortal eyes but manifest to the ears and present in great power, when, caught within the captive bodies, they cry out and prove that Christ shines in his saint, trembling, by the shaking of limbs and the rolling of heads, and by their tortures; but they do not torment their own bodies, crying their own pains through others' mouths, begging pardon; the avenger is hidden, the punishment is seen.

Then, if the more violent enemy has bound any with heavier evil, this day looses them by divine power. Now one may see everywhere breasts purged by a holy remedy lying prostrate at the thresholds, now restored in mind, now giving thanks with their own voice; a trembling crowd of gaping men runs together, tears burst forth mixed with joy for all, God is believed present to all there; Felix is the glory of the immeasurable Christ. The kindly day is celebrated by great gatherings; all dedicate fulfilled vows at the holy doorposts; all things of earth and heaven rejoice; the upper air seems to smile with the heavens opened, the breezes to breathe spring with silent gusts, and the milky zone to gird the glad sky. There is no limit, no rest, for the peoples gathering in dense columns; they hasten from night into light, and it irks them to wait for the day; the night's delay to eager vows is broken, and torches conquer night with flames. It delights to see one city crowded with many cities and so many swarms driven together by one vow. The Lucanian peoples gather, the youth of Apulia gather, and the Calabrians, and all whom either tide washes, which sounds round Latium with wave on left and right; and joyful Campania, through its sixty cities, rejoices as at its own festival: those whom rich Capua holds in its broad walls, those whom fair Neapolis, or those whom Gaurus feeds, who work the glad Massic slopes, and those who drink the Ufens and the Sarnus, who till the dry fields of the Tanager and the happy farms of the watered Galaesus, those whom mighty Atina, whom mother Aricia sends.

And Rome herself, mighty with the sacred monuments of the heavenly chiefs, Peter and Paul, rejoices to be thinned out in honour of this day, and, pouring out thousands from the mouth of the Capena gate, sends them to the walls of friendly Nola over ten times twelve miles in a dense column; far and wide the Appian Way lies hidden by the packed crowds. No less, by peoples setting out from another region, the rough pavements of the mountainous Latin Way are worn, those whom lofty Praeneste, whom fertile Aquinum feeds, and those whom ancient Ardea sends from the suburban coasts, and those who have left the city of Cales and twin Teanum, which the stern Auruncan or the rough Apulian inhabits; hither too runs a crowd from olive-bearing Venafrum, and the hardy Samnites leave their mountain towns. Piety conquered the hard road; the love of Christ conquers all things, and kindly faith persuades those stiff in mind and in place to suffer harsh things and at the same time to lay aside harsh hearts. One day calls all, and one Nola receives them, full of itself through its whole space and spacious enough for all, so that you might believe its walls are widened for the countless guests. So, Nola, you rise up in the likeness of Rome. You also, under a double honour, have embraced everlasting crowns of your Felix, first as priest, then as martyr, through every age; mother of a divine friend, you touch heaven well by twofold merit. As presbyter he first founded you, celebrating the kindly altars with godly worship, and ruled you with gentle governance. Now too Felix adorns you with his everlasting name.

For, consecrated in your bosom, he draws honour from his merit, his godly bones laid in a fragrant tomb. Now the golden thresholds are adorned with snow-white curtains, the bright altars are crowned with crowded lamps, fragrant lights burn on waxed papyrus wicks, they glitter night and day. So night shines with the splendour of day, and the day itself, illustrious with heavenly honour, shines more brightly, its light doubled by countless lamps. We too are happy, to whom it is given to see this day in person and to celebrate it, and to behold our patron's rewards, and to congratulate Christ who grants such great things to his own, and to rejoice amid the glad throngs. Bring praise to God, boys, pay your godly vows, and likewise give festal songs with chaste dances; strew the ground with flowers, fringe the thresholds with garlands. Let winter breathe a purple spring, let the year be flowery before its time, let nature yield to the holy day. You too, earth, owe garlands to the martyr's tomb; but the sacred glory of the threshold above surrounds him, flourishing with the double crown of war and of peace. Ask, I pray, that this day be serene for us with eternal peace; may it be granted to rejoice when it returns again, and to pay here at your festivals yearly vows and songs, with Christ's divinity appeased and calm. This is our love, this our labour; receive these vows of your own and commend them to God, so that, when with diligent care our service has been paid to you over a long age, then at last you may release your nurslings, pleasing by their godly labour, sending them on with your hand, and not refuse to carry the souls of your own, placed before your face, in your fatherly bosom to the face of the shining Lord, whom, kind in goodness but dreadful in majesty, entreat, that, gentle to your prayers and merits, he may forgive us our debts. When you also, a great part of the godly, Felix, accompany the reigning Lamb, ask that we be set in the flock of sheep, so that the sentence of the highest Judge may give us to you again as this gift too, and not assign us to the left-hand goats, who have ill thanked him, but rather place us on the right, in the portion of the godly, and gather us to the bountiful flock and the praised lambs.

My yearly vows return, and with them the yearly debts of my tongue: your birthday, O Felix, most illustrious to Christ, dearer to me than my own birthday; on which, however great the public joys of countless crowds, there is something special for your own, because Christ has granted that we be yours, bestowing worthless men on a dear friend; not because you were worthy of such worthless servants, you whom God deems worthy to go as a companion in eternal triumphs, but because the good Father willed so to enrich us, poor in justice and needy of salvation, that we, wrongly rich in crimes, the course of our riches turned to the better, instead of all wealth and all affections, and instead of noble titles and vain honours, might take Felix as all our wealth, fatherland and home. You are father and fatherland and home and substance to us; our cradle has been moved into your bosom, and your breast is our nest; well warmed in it we grow, and, changing our bodies into another form, we are stripped of our earthly stock, and as wings come on we are turned into birds by the seed of the divine Word. As you lighten the yoke, we know Christ's yoke is gentle; in you Christ is kind even to the unworthy and sweet to the bitter. So this day must be held solemn by us too, your birthday, because, as you abolished our evils, we died to the world, that we might be born to good things in Christ. Rise then, lyre, and be tuned with all your strings; awake, strength of my soul; let love strike my inmost being with a silent song, and, on the tortoiseshell of the heart, not silent, with the teeth struck, let the lyre of the mouth sound with the plectrum of the tongue. I shall not call the Castalian Muses, mere phantoms, nor deaf Phoebus from the Aonian rock;

Christ is the kindler of my song; by Christ's gift I, a sinner, dare to speak of a saint and of heavenly things. Nor is it hard for you, Almighty, to loose my mouth in learned measures, you who bid the dumb speak, the dry flow, the hard dissolve. For you made a she-ass cry out in speech, and sucklings establish perfect praise for you, and you dissolved the solid rock into rivers and ordered the waterless land to stream with sudden floods, watering the deserts in hope of the peoples, into whose parched souls godly grace has flowed, whom Christ, the rock, streaming with a living fountain, has refreshed. So I, the least part of mankind, relying on that gift of your dew, O Christ, dry as I am, pray for living draughts. Give me a word from your fountain; I cannot speak of what is yours without you; for the praise of your martyr is your praise too, you who, almighty, make men strong in divine things and overcome strong things through the weak, triumphing from the flesh, conquering the powers of the air in our body. So be present, that with you as guide I may go back to the origin and tell of your Felix, whose noble stock was drawn from the East; for no other land better befitted as the homeland of Felix than that which bore the patriarchs and the godly prophets, sacred vessels of Christ, and from which, pouring out its rivers through the tongues of the apostles, the sound of the gospel flowed forth into the whole world. So Felix, owed to God from there, his father having set out, came to Italy, not yet born, yet in his father, so that by affection he might be born a citizen of our shores and remember that he was born for none but us. So father Abraham, following the Lord's commands, exchanged his native lands for foreign soil and laid down a sacred seed in Canaanite fields;

whence, as the line passed into foreign lands, a mystic origin transmitted Felix to us, whom that perfect faith brought forth, sprung from that root, so that he might be for us a godly vein of faith. Felix, even now, while he rests with his flesh laid aside, a spirit living in Christ, by the working merits of lofty virtue changes into Abraham's seed the hardness of stones, which he raises up to the goods of life. So, born in this city of a Syrian father, he cherished beloved Nola as the image of a homeland, blessing it with his pleasing residence; and, left much gold, he flourished rich in wealth, though not the sole heir. With his brother Hermias, who bore his father's name, he divided the earthly wealth; Felix alone obtained the heavenly; a discordant judgment divided the two brothers: the world drove Hermias away, Christ took Felix up to himself; the one preferred perishing things, the other solid; the one clung to the present, the other turned his soil to heaven, his patrimony to the kingdom; the one was heir only of his own father, the other co-heir of Christ. But who would wonder at offspring so varied from one blood, who rereads, among the holy pledges of the ancient parents, that Rebecca, fruitful with the stock of two peoples, suffered the battles of her womb and complained to God of the struggles in her pregnant belly, since already then there raged within the holy mother's womb the discord that now rages within the womb of the world: rough for the Jews, who follow hairy Esau in faithlessness and are assigned to serve the younger people, but gentle for us, who follow Jacob through the gentle ways of peace, where the way of light leads, by a better birth.

So, unlike blood from the same blood of brothers, Hermias, like rough Edom, following earthly things, grew squalid, a captive in the empty image of the world, and chose the hard laws of the Idumean ancestor, living by his own sword, and bearing the barren labour of vain military service, in which he submitted to Caesar's arms, living as a private man with no part in the duties of Christ. But my Felix, born to take up the arms of the eternal King, passed over into the names of father Israel, and his godly mind, giving itself from boyhood to heavenly things, resolved to serve God; nor did grace come poor, and as much as his soul thirsted, gaping for light with capacious heart, so lavishly did it draw in the inflowing gifts of God. In his first years he served as reader. Then he took the grade whose duty is with faithful voice to adjure evil spirits and drive them out with sacred words. Because he did this with a clear power of merit, rightly gaining the venerable insignia of a priest, he adorned the honour he had earned with a mind worthy of the rank. But so that the fillet alone should not adorn his sacred head, a stronger cause for a doubled crown arose: the dire madness of profane frenzy broke out, when the godly church was shaken by sacrilegious war, and impiety demanded above all from the whole people those whose piety was more notable. Then the aged Maximus, the bishop, was forming the city of Nola with holy laws and a gentle mouth, strong in Felix his presbyter, whom with a father's mind he embraced as a son and destined as heir of his see; but, driven off by a sudden storm, with his faith not yielding, he sought deserted places.

Then, as the bishop was sought, Felix shone more and more, set against the swords, made alone the object of hatred for the faith; nor was he regarded for his rank: faith was greater than rank, because the cause was faith alone. He is sought then, when the livid dragon stirs up his arms, desiring to overthrow that by which we rise and he falls. So, as the bishop fled the cruel punishments, Felix alone, or first of the people, like the head of the body, is sought. All strive to conquer him, and as though he were a lofty citadel in besieged walls they attack him with siege works, so that, its defence overcome, the rest of the city may fall, laid low in easy ruin. O madness worthy of the faithless! They believe that by one man the faith that the whole world has believed can be extinguished. Alas, wretched impiety, blind with infernal darkness, whither do you rush? Against whom do you move your weapons? Do you believe that God consists in one mortal, and, if you destroy bodies, that the divine strength and mind can be abolished with them? It goes through the members of the world; by it you yourself are born and, though unworthy, are fed; on its divinity depend victory or defeat; by its strength even one man is stronger than countless men; armed with unarmed piety, it lays low those armed with iron but unarmed in heart, Christ conquering through faith, which, aware of the heavenly truth, purchases future life by present death, and, the body conquered, joyfully brings back to God the victorious mind and carries it up to the rejoicing stars. What good then is it, madman, that you attack godly Felix with such a mass of fury? Within, hidden, remains his mind unconquered for God; nor now does the nature of earthly man alone resist you; God himself fights back, whom you attack, and against your poisons, ancient serpent, Christ himself offers himself through the bodies of his servants, and, binding you in your own snares, in the slaughter of his own lays you low, triumphing over death through the appearance of death.

But their own error, with frenzied goads, urged savage hearts to burn with a bloody thirst and to demand holy blood as if it were the palm of crime. So when Nola received the sacrilegious fury and dreaded the swords aimed at its godly citizens, venerable Felix is sought in the shaken city. Nor did he flee; breathing the stars already with lofty breath, and sharpening his mind for battle with silent goads, the fearless shepherd guarded the trembling fold, ready, by the Lord's example, to give his life for the flock. So, eager, he stands firm like a wall against the savage enemies, and in white-haired years grows green again with flourishing faith, wholly turned to the stars in mind, mindful of Christ, unmindful of his age, bearing God in his heart, his breast full of Christ. Nor can he now contain himself; he seems holy and greater, and his eyes shine with a starry light and his face with honour. Forthwith he is seized, rejoicing, and dragged forth by the savage hands of the raging men; but, as is the way of the wicked enemy, whose greater labour is to destroy our souls rather than our bodies, he puts off the sword and first tries him with terrors, and rises toward death by degrees of punishment. The first stage of torment is woven of prison. Iron chains are joined to the dark cells; steel binds his hands and neck, and he stiffens in the stocks that pull his feet apart; fragments of potsherd are strewn, so that a penal bed may keep off sleep with its sharpness. Yet the confessor is not without rest nor deprived of light, he with whom Christ, now joined to him in everything, suffers, whose heavier punishment multiplies his green crowns, who with ranging mind travels through the heavens. And, though in a bound body, his free spirit flies ahead of itself into the inner sanctuary of the most high Christ, his soul anticipating its rewards with sure vows.

So a blessed passion pressed Felix with holy penalties, with heavy chains and a blind prison, and as many penalties as his subjected flesh had put on from men, so many palms did his patience receive from Christ. Meanwhile Maximus, sick in the lonely mountains, content to have fled the hands and deadly faces of the executioners, was bearing a different martyrdom, but with a cross no lighter than if he had given his neck to the sword and his limbs to tortures or flames; a sharper care for his flock burns and afflicts him; he is burned by the fire of cold and stiffens with the icy dew of the sky, without bread and without roof, wakeful night and day, he joins both times in intent prayer; prostrate on the thorny ground he is pricked in his limbs by briars and in his mind by cares; he fights within and without, and bears in his body the thorns of the countryside, and suffers in his sorrowful breast the thorns of sadness. Covering hard with hard, by the bitter torture of the mind he lightens the torments of the limbs, and the mind's pain shuts out the sense of bodily pain. Yet the sick matter of earth, though the strength of the soul remained unshaken, its faith scorning the frailties of the flesh, overcome by winter and hunger and worn by a hard bed, was leaving its mind as the body failed, and the cold, drunk deep into the empty marrow of the weary old man, was driving out life as his blood froze. The kindness of the most high Father, moved for so great a bishop, did not bear that his body be consumed in an obscure death. He could indeed have fed him also as he fed Elijah, sending food-bearing birds through the hungry wilderness, and could have covered him in a secret grave like Moses;

but God had given this gift to one friend only, to be covered in hidden earth, because so great an honour rightly befitted that body which had shone face to face with God's mouth and speech, so that, having fulfilled the laws of mortality, he should have God alone as witness of his grave. So the gentle Father, looking with serene light on the priest and confessor, did not bear any longer that he waste away in the silent woods; and since he was preparing to join to his merits a fully worthy companion, he chose Felix from the whole number in the prison, to whose merits he would add this work: to lift the limbs of the kindly old man, call back his soul, bring him back revived, and restore to the astonished sheep the comfort of their dear shepherd. So there came, shining in the silent night, an angel, and among the whole crowd of bound prisoners he speaks to Felix alone, whom holy piety had made a prisoner; the horror of the black prison fled. Felix, roused at once by the voice and light of the sacred minister, trembles and drinks in the word with faithful ear. And at first, as if he were receiving God's commands in the image of a mocking dream, he is dazed and anxious, and pleads that he cannot follow, since the chain prevents him, and that he is held besides by the bar and the guard of the watched prison. But the divine voice, rebuking him as he delayed, bids him rise, his chains shaken off. And suddenly the chains flowed off his hands like soft things, his neck, freed of its own accord from the iron yoke, is lifted, and his feet spring out, the block of the stocks loosened. Wondrous faith! The prison unlocked, its bars intact, the guard asleep, he goes out of the doors unafraid, and a way is made through the very men by whom the way is shut; the angel went before, through the friendly silence of the quiet night.

He was light and road for Felix. Is not the one Christ present in every saint? As the same Spirit flourishes in all who are born in Christ, so the grace itself of the godly agrees. I see the ancient pattern return in a recent history, in which Peter, bidden to depart, exalted in the band of twice six disciples, came out, his chains slipping off of their own accord, and likewise out of the closed prison, where an angel, going before, led him, stealing Herod's prey. So, God leading him out, my Felix, through the doubled darkness of prison and night, dark to the others but lit up for him alone, with impunity through the very guards, pressing on his steps with steady pace, directed along unknown paths, sought what he was bidden. And after crossing the secret, pathless woods he found the country place of the weary old man, and sorrowfully sees him drawing sick sighs, now with a feeble breath. And as soon as he recognized the limbs of his dear father, he threw himself into his embrace, gave kisses to the familiar face, and tried by cherishing to call back warmth to the cold limbs, and with frequent breaths of his panting mouth to restore living senses to the warmed body. But the body was moved neither by calling nor by shaking, now like one lifeless; yet a slight breath, the last of life, and a trembling of the inner fibres betrayed it. Felix, anxious at such a sight, is torn in his godly breast, seeing the bloodless limbs and the face pale with hunger, and having nothing with which to bring help in their need, no fire far or food near, to revive the wasting man with food and the stiffened man with fire.

As he searched and approached Christ with much prayer, asking by what help or what way he could fulfil the service bidden, the Almighty produced a sudden cluster of grapes from the briars and bade it hang close to his head, so that from the neighbouring branch he could easily pluck food grown of its own accord. So, divinely refreshed, Felix rejoices with godly mind in the gift offered, and, plucking the cluster with his hand, brings it to the dying man's lips, and since he, his teeth now clenched, cannot taste or take sweet food, he squeezes the juicy grapes and drips in the flowing juice, parting the dry lips with his finger, until, God breathing on the feeble efforts and the struggling hand, he loosened a little the stiff jaws and gave a narrow entry to the opened mouth, by which the pressed grape might pour in a little dew. Then sense returns to the soul, warmth to the bones, light to the eyes, and the whole of life, and the tongue, which had clung, crusted, to the dry throat, now exercises its usual speech, after the slippery moisture has opened the voice's path. So, reviving, he sees close by that most familiar face, the face of his Felix, and embracing him in turn complains that he is late: “For the Lord had long since promised,” he says, “that you would be with me, Felix, my portion; Felix, my chief pledge, what delays, I ask, held you so long, or where? If I gave way in my frail body for a time, yet I have endured to be faithful with a solid heart. The place and the very state in which you see me dragging out the last of this life teach that I did not flee from fear of death and that I put Christ before my own life; I fled, not from love of the light, but fearing this frailty of a weak body; and yet, seeking shelter, I could have lived safe in another city, if faith had been cheap to me and this life dear.

I sought unknown mountains and bare deserts, laying my neck in the bosom of the sweet Lord, to die with him as witness or to be fed by him. And not in vain, see, was this our trust; the Almighty was present and chose you to send to me, through whom he might give me back his gifts; use, my son, the precepts of piety that command the work, and, taking me up on your shoulders, carry me back to our common fold.” Tireless Felix, glad at the longed-for task, takes up the dear burden as the light weight of Christ and carries it so swift in running that he seemed rather to be carried himself than to carry; and truly Christ himself carries the carrier, and God added wings to feet swift with piety. In the same night Felix alone receives so many gifts and carries them out together; bidden to break his own chains, he restores the priest and carries him back restored, and sets him down safe under the roof of his house, which one old woman alone was keeping; so lofty, and by this merit, was Maximus a confessor, that of his bereft house and property one old woman alone remained to him. Knocking at the doors, Felix wakes her; she, astonished at the first sounds, barely recognizes the familiar voice, and receives her master, opening the house, trembling in voice and step, fear shaking her old age. Felix said to her: “Take this deposit, which the stars of the night, witnesses with me, and the angelic hands under Christ as prince hand over to you as I hand it over; take with faithful bosom this jewel of the Lord, which at the last time you are to return to us unharmed before the Lord as judge, with whom as witness you receive it now.” Maximus follows these words, and calling back his Felix said: “You too take, my son, a return for the gift, which he who bade you be present for the deposit bade me, once restored, to give to you.” Then he places his sacred right hand on the head of his beloved Felix, asking at the same time all the gifts of Christ, as Isaac, venerable among the patriarchs, blessed his son with the dew of heaven and the richness of the earth; so Maximus, blessing Felix for Christ with a father's mouth and with an apostolic mouth, and enriching him, crowned him with the honour of an unfading crown and increased him with everlasting riches, which we see even now.

Times follow times; age goes and comes; each day flees by pushing on the next and turns the world round; all things pass by; the glory of the saints endures in Christ, who makes all things new while he himself abides. At last then, returning day, be born for me, day longed for the whole year, which renews sweet festivities and my vows, which demand of me solemn gifts, bringing back the birthday in which thousands of countless peoples rejoice, in which special joys touch me, in which I owe the ratified gifts of a servant tongue to be offered to my Felix, to whom, with dedicated mind, I am devoted in Christ the Lord; it is right for me to celebrate this saint also with the service of my mouth in yearly songs. I will tell, then, his merits and the causes of his merits, by which he obtained the rewards of heavenly praises, eternal days, and the name of great honour. Already the former book has told you the first acts of the martyr: whence his home, what his family, in what studies he was raised, by what grade then, called through holy duties, he preferred to serve the everlasting Christ rather than wander along his father's ways through the byways of the world; for his father had lived under Caesar, his military service completed. We have told also the punishments he endured in a foul prison, which the confessor underwent, ready to bear death too, had not God, forestalling the swords, released him from his chains and called him to other deeds, so that first Maximus the bishop might return to the sacred hall, who in lonely woods was gasping out the last of his life, sick, driven out by the raging enemy, whom Felix, as bidden, carried on his own body and set down in the dwelling of a poor house;

and, blessed by the holy mouth of the blessed old man in return for his services, he departed, and for a few days hid in silence under the roof of his own house, wearying the heavenly Lord with a mind not silent; piercing above the stars with direct prayer, he knocked on him with his near merit, asking that peace might come forth. Meanwhile the days flowed by; peace seemed to return. Felix left his hiding place, and at last, trusting a serene sky, began to give himself back, glad, to the glad brothers and to entrust himself to the calm city. The sheep of Christ rejoiced that their shepherd was restored. He soothed the flock, frightened by the recent storm, with heavenly admonitions, and, guiding anxious hearts with the Word as leader, strengthened them with the love of faith, teaching that the bitter and the sweet of the world are to be scorned; he warned them not to give way to terrors, but readily to offer their breasts to fires or swords themselves; and he himself added weight to his words, a confessor who had suffered what he taught must be endured, a teacher to all by word and example alike. That evil one did not bear this long; but he bristled his black locks and puffed up his neck with rabid poisons, and sent his venom into wicked breasts, so that the grace of Felix might burn black minds. He planted goads, and the fury of viperous envy blazed in wicked minds; their shameless anger seeks first his house; impious desire for crime burns in all. Impiety thirsts for Felix; but, absent from his house, he happened to be standing, unconcerned, in the middle of the city, surrounded, as was his custom, by brotherly friends, sowing godly words in the ears of the believing people.

Behold, seeking him with drawn swords, they arrive, when suddenly either the hearts of the enemies or his face are changed; raging, they did not recognize the man they knew, and they ask him for Felix. Felix, where he is seen, is not seen; he is himself and not himself; though near, he is far. The same man becomes unknown and known to his fellow citizens, faith distinguishing his face: to believers he was himself, to the enemies another. He himself perceived the plan of a favouring Christ and, smiling, said to those asking: “I do not know the Felix you seek.” Straightway they pass him by; and he leaves the square, having baffled the gaping dogs as the Lord mocked them. They had not gone far, and were asking everyone in what quarter Felix was, when someone rebuked them and gave information, not knowing the reason, and believing them out of their minds with fury, since they had not seen the man himself close by, to whom they had spoken face to face. Struck by the strangeness of the trick and raging more fiercely, they soon return and run along the very tracks of the man. And now they were drawing near, but, warned by the uproar of the city running before them and the shouts of the astonished crowd on every side, Felix by a turn avoids the threatening wounds, and, leaving the way, takes himself far off from the open space, and, finding a place which happened to open as an escape to the frightened man, withdrawn from the crowded city; even so he was not far from the black pursuers, he who, barely withdrawn from the sight of those following, had somehow, fearing them, avoided the hostile swords; and he was about to be caught, because the place, with no barrier of a bolt, could not keep off the wicked men; for with no doors it lay open to the public street, the untrustworthy wall of a half-ruined building, broken.

But the divine hand placed itself between the saint and the enemies and fenced the place with a wondrous defence, not with a pile of stones, nor bars put on iron-bound doors, by which, through human arts, we close our halls, but suddenly a filthy mound of rubble grew together, and a spider, at command, stretched its swaying webs and with trembling folds built a barrier across the unprotected opening, and gave it the squalid look of a deserted ruin. As soon as this met the threatening men, they were amazed, and, stopping in their tracks, said to one another in turn: “Is it not madness to try an entrance here, or to believe that any man has entered where tiny worms have left their signs? Small flies break these nets; do we foolishly think that a man has got in through what is closed and that the delicate web was not broken by so great a body? Rather, that informer now deserves our hands, who cunningly with crafty guile led us into deserted places, and, turned elsewhere, falsely said that Felix lay hidden in this spot, to divert our arms by malicious deceit, a friend to the life of the fugitive. So let us withdraw, for to stand here longer will be the laughter of the crowd, and it will be marked as a mad error to strive to step here searching for a man's hiding place, where, with rotten rubble or spiders' veils drawn over it, the untrodden ground shows its recesses to be unentered.” Without delay they go away hastily in different directions, raging; but God, as Scripture sings, laughed at them in their mad threats, Christ from his heavenly citadel, and had veiled his Felix with sacred wings. He, safe in the bosom of the Lord, struck away the glowing darts, triumphant, with the helmet and shield of faith, and the confessor carried the sword of the Word in his mouth.

Armed in his hands with piety and full in his chaste breast of God, he covered it with the breastplate of distinguished merit. O divine wisdom, rich in many ways, always confounding the strong things of the world by the weak! Walls with high ramparts scarcely defend peoples, and the enemy often overwhelms those who trust in strong defences, and overthrown cities expose them to death. Now a spider protected the saint from armed men, with God defending; the enemy stood, driven back by tender nets; iron force gave way to an airy thread. Vain is the safety of men; my strength is no strength to me, if I lack the strength of God. Where is the vast strength of the giants? Where the kings of Pharos? Where great Jericho? For all of them their own glory, by which they swelled, was the cause of their destruction; nor did the virtues of heroes break them, but rather the divine power broke them by weak things. That giant fell like a dog by the sling of a shepherd boy; the sound of trumpets broke down that city; that proud king lay on the sand of the shore, weighing the riches of his kingdom in a naked death. So when Christ is with us, even a spider is a wall; but for him from whom Christ is absent, even a wall will become a spider's web. So when the crowds had gone away and silence had fallen, and deep night gave darkness trustworthy for secret flight, Felix comes out and changes his hiding place, singing this to the Lord: “If I walk in the midst of the shadow of night, I will fear no evil, since your right hand is with me; through hell I shall go, not without light.” So, with God as guide, he takes, in a remote quarter, a small room among low roofs around an open court, where an old cistern lay dry under a deep shelter.

Nearby, in the adjoining building, lived a woman holy to God, who, not knowing of the hidden confessor, fed Felix for Christ as if she knew. I will sing wonders, the device of the Lord, who fed his nursling through one who unknowingly fed her own. Now diligently loaves, now other food which, as was her custom, she had cooked for herself, in a rapture of mind, by divine arrangement, she would carry there, where Felix lay hidden, with the Lord as witness, veiled by the Lord; but neither when she went there did she know she had gone in, nor when she had left that place was she mindful of her entrance; and though she had busily brought in what she had prepared, though she served the saint with her own hands in feeding him, yet, unaware of so great a service, she could not know this from her own heart, since she did it not by her own mind but by the power of Christ; and, entering the place of the hiding and the pit built above its mouth, she would leave the food set out, and, believing she had put it down at home, so she always went away, mindful of setting the food down and soon unmindful of having set it. O woman blessed by God, like one of those birds which once fed the prophet withdrawn from the world, you too fed a martyr under a secret roof, like a bird obeying the Lord, and, unaware of your holy service yet sharing in it, what you did, and whom you served, you will at last learn with joy in that time, when God himself, Christ, will give you for his confessor's sake the crown of justice; then Felix himself will repay you your meals, with Christ as judge, which God transferred to the sweet use of the consecrated martyr, as once he sent food cooked for the reapers, the prophet hanging in the air by an angel's hand, to a fasting prophet among raging monsters;

no longer a wild ferocity, because their prey and holy fasting reined in the savage lions' greedy jaws. They say that for six whole months on end he lived without the company of men under that hiding place of dark and narrow roof alike, needing no human help, always abounding in the comfort of Christ; who at that time, it is said, often deigned to come to him with his speech, often fed him with his own hand and gave him from heaven drinks, not of rainwater, which the clouds pour out everywhere for all, but a dew which grace poured out from the sky for Felix alone; for at that time, as happens, summer was parched with too many suns and had dried up the well too, which had supplied sparing drinks to the hidden man. But lest bodily thirst should burn him, who, thirsting for Christ, was bearing this penalty of an afflicted body as well, a cloud, brought from a clear sky and gathered into a small ball, through the narrow opening of the roof poured sweet liquid into the mouth of the thirsting man, as if squeezed by a hand, and refreshed him, intent on heaven, with the milky juice of a heavenly fleece. What wonder if Christ feeds now one freed from earthly stain, whom, while he was set in the body, the Holy Spirit fed, and for whom the bread was the Word, God himself, the bread of heaven, on which every angel feeds? When this time had passed, restored peace sheathed the swords, and God warned Felix to come out of his hiding place, he who had long since closed his calm ears to the clamour of the world, drawing forgetfulness over human affairs. As he comes out into the light, new to those already despairing, and is seen as if come back to life in his native city, many hesitate to recognize him and first ask: “Is it truly your face? Are you that blessed one,” they say, “restored to us after so long a time, Felix?

From what region do you come? Were you given to heaven, or, returned from paradise to earth, do you revisit our dwellings?” He confirms their belief that he is present before them in body, that he has lived preserved by God; joy is given to all, and he is celebrated by all the people with praises and for his merits. Maximus the bishop had died, having lived out a long age, and the flock lacked the guidance of a shepherd. The whole fold bleated the name of Felix, whom the confessor's glory crowned for Christ, and whom his tongue and his life in harmony with his teaching promised as a saving teacher; but so that in this also he might bear the palm of justice, pressing down his lofty merit with quiet heart, as if unworthy, he does not dare to grow in honour, and testifies that it is rather due to the old man Quintus, because he had earlier earned the grade of the shared honour as presbyter. The difference amounted to seven days. So under this bishop too Felix lived as presbyter and grew in merits, because he would not grow in see; Quintus himself, as if the lesser, deferred to him in everything, and had Felix as his mouth and tongue. He ruled the flock with his offices, Felix with his speech. The grace of Christ increased holy Felix with many other virtues, nor did he fight lesser battles in peace than the confessor had waged with strong arms. In the sad storm he had scorned bodily safety; likewise he was a scorner of wealth and honours in secure peace. He was not secure in keeping his merit, but more cautious, so as to guard the goods of life won after he had overcome the dangers of death, and among the rocks he feared the calm waters. We have told how he trampled on death and ambition; now learn another palm of the confessor.

He conquered avarice; for as heir he had possessed many estates and houses, rich with his father's wealth. The confessor had been proscribed, but when peace was restored it was allowed him to claim back his rights, if he wished; yet he preferred to heed the word of the master: “All things are lawful, not all things help.” He prefers the useful to the lawful, and shuddered at reclaiming as his rights the lost farms, as though he would contract the contagion of earthly stain. Many pressed him, above all Archelais, of an ancient name, as illustrious in holy faith as in name, a widow rich in wealth, revering holy Felix with faithful piety and dear to him in turn. She honoured him in reverence according to his merit, and, as they say, claiming a companion's right over a mind joined to her own, she often wearied his godly heart with frequent complaints: why did he refuse rights owed and ready to be returned, which, once recovered, he could distribute to the needy with the interest of a great reward? She also often offered very many gifts from her own property. He, content with a godly mind toward all things, smiled with a calm breast at the woman's concern, well aware himself of the heavenly goods that he held as compensation for the earthly. So, firmly, he answered his dear friends as they pressed: “Do you force me to seek earthly things again and lose the everlasting? It is better that wealth be lacking to one saved than life to one rich; rich, I shall lack God; poor, I shall have Christ. The grace of Christ will enrich one poor in riches.” Keeping this mind, he cultivated three acres of modest land, not holding them as his own but renting them as a tenant, with his own hand, without a servant, the occupier of a poor man's garden; but even these riches from the soil he, rich, poured out on the needy for the Lord, always dividing his gathered vegetables with the poor, and his table with the poor. One day used up his care of possessing; one garment covered him, often scarcely even one. If he had two, he clothed a naked man with the better. Often he changed the wretched rags of the poor for a new covering, and the poor man, changed by Felix's clothing, shone out from his black; whereas Felix, in a beggar's covering, was shabby, adorning his mind with an unkempt body. Living with this piety, ripe for God both in age and merit, he closed his age with full days, and changed, not closed, the ages of his godly life.

Are you leaving already, and in haste do you leave us, whom yet you leave only in place, since we shall always be bound to you in mind without end? Are you departing already, as the land where you dwell calls you back far away? But you remain here too, holy Niceta, since even when you have set out we hold you in our heart. Go, mindful of us, and, as you go, remain present in spirit, planted in turn in our souls; draw and carry with you those you bear in … O land and peoples, too blessed, whom, returning from us, you will now visit, whom Christ will visit, coming with your foot and your mouth. You will go far, to the northern Dacians, you will go to be seen by twin Epirus, and through the Aegean tides you will make your way to Thessalonica. But now the first road will carry you through Apulian lands, spacious on a long plain, where the fleeces dyed with Canusian dye glow. But when the road has gone on a little, may Christ, I pray, give you mild heat, and may a light breeze without cloud breathe on the dry Calabrians.

As at the hands of the ancient prophet, by the sacrament of the cross, the water grew sweet when the wood was cast in, and Marah put away its bitter waters, so may the sky now be tempered for you, and the air, thinned by light fair weather, breathe with pure breaths gently into healthful breezes, the air which, heavy with breath from the marshes, bringing back the foul smells of snakes, is wont to dissolve into diseases bodies swollen by the thick wind; may the mighty Lord of things command it to be put to flight or changed, and now supply to his priest good breezes of health. As once, when Egypt was perishing, covered with the darkness of dense night, where the sacred people of the living God dwelt there was light for the world, a pattern now proved in the whole world, when the godly part of the holy faith shines with Christ, and error buries the rest in darkness: so on my Niceta, along whatever shore his journey carries him, may the Lord prosper all things, until he is carried, glad, to his longed-for native city.

Go on, Niceta, along the way you return well, with Christ accompanying your prosperous course, Christ whom your peoples have long been wearying night and day, demanding you back, as a field thirsts for rain to relieve its crops, and as tender calves seek their mothers when their milk has been held back. So we, by the just prayers of your people, who rightly seek back their own parent, are compelled, though unsatisfied, to yield, our wish overcome. And since the hope of keeping you is now snatched away, affection urges us to favour what pleases you; now, though we may hate those roads which snatch you away, we hate them, yet we love the same roads. We hate them because they draw you back, we love them because they brought your face to us from afar to see. For these, bound fast by overwhelming love, we now pray that they may be laid easy for you, by land and sea, with the name of the most high Christ going before. May he, making every road a plain for you, press down the steep mountains and fill the hollow valleys, level the rough places, join the gaps. As you are carried through Hydruntum and Lupiae, unmarried troops of brothers and sisters together will surround you, singing the Lord with one mouth.

Who would give me wings like a dove, that I might swiftly be among those choirs which, singing Christ God with you as leader, strike the stars? But though we are held by the sluggish bond of a sick body, yet we fly out after you in mind, and with you we sing hymns to the Lord. For, entwined within your feelings, whether you sing or pray, we too are brought forth with your prayer and with your voice. Then, as the sea takes the place of land, the smooth gulf of the Adriatic will obey you, the wave will lie down, and with the gentle west wind the sails will swell. You will go gliding over the lying sea, and in a ship armed with the sign of salvation you will go victorious with the yard of the cross, safe from waves and south winds. The glad sailors will sing their usual chant, its measures turned into hymns, and with godly voices will lead the breezes as companions over the sea. Before all, like a resounding trumpet, the tongue of Niceta will lead the singing, setting Christ to music; David, the eternal harper, will sing psalms over the whole sea. The whales, trembling, will hear the Amen, and the glad monsters will swim up from afar with playful swimming to the priest singing to the Lord.

On all sides the dolphins will sport, glistening, with open mouths, and though without voice, they will express joys that rival human tongues. For what does not know and live for God, by whose word all things were sown? Hence the depths of the sea know the praise of God, and the dumb cry out. Witness to us is the beast of the old prophet, roused from the deep at the Lord's nod, to swallow the sunken man and then give back what it had swallowed. But now that wild beast itself, toward our seer, will devour with its ears only godly songs; it will satisfy an unfed belly, fed by song. Wherever you please to go your way, through the waves, through the land, even through enemies, you will go armed with the helmet of salvation, Christ your head. Let Raphael fly to you, sent, as once to Tobias among the Medes; so let the angel himself be present as Niceta's companion, escorting him all the way to the Dacians. Let that leader lead his servant likewise, God, who once led Jacob in safety, a fugitive from the face of his proud brother. For Niceta is likewise a fugitive; what the patriarch did once, this man always does, fleeing the world for the walls of high heaven;

and those steps, on which he saw angels passing up and down in turn, this man strives, with a life that rises above the clouds, to climb, hastening to the stars by the ladder of the cross, from where God, leaning to the ground from flashing thrones, watches the varied labours and wars of the mind. And you, Niceta, well named victor over the body, like him who was called Israel, because he saw the highest Begetter with lofty heart: hence my Niceta is approved a true Israelite without guile, who sees God, Christ, with the light of solid faith. May he, our God, our way always, be our companion and go before us, light for our paths, and for our feet the word a lamp, by which through the blind shallows of this dark age we may be guided by the torch of the true light, until we may touch the longed-for harbours of salvation, which we now seek over the wavy sea, while we float on the tide of a wandering mind, carried as in a fragile hull, the earthly body. But with the cross's helm steering this ship within us, we now spread to Christ the godly sails of the heart, as he brings us back glad with a favourable wind.

So may the same leader now accompany you on the way by which you now hasten back, Niceta, and restore you safe to your native threshold. But when the sea is crossed, there remains again the labour of roads on land, as you are carried all the way to the happy shores for which you have been given as priest. You will walk through the Philippian fields of the Macedonians, through the city of Tomi, and you will go to Scupi, near your homeland, a Dardanian guest. O with what joys that land will then resound, where you teach stiff peoples to bow their wild necks to gentle Christ! And where, in the Riphaean regions, Boreas binds the rivers with thick frosts, here you melt minds stiff with frost with fire from above. For the Bessi, hard both in land and in mind, and harder than their own snow, now made sheep, are gathered, with you as leader, into the hall of peace. And the necks which, always untamed in war, they refused to give to slavery, now they rejoice to bow, subdued to the yoke of the true Lord. Now the Bessian exults, richer for the price of his labour; the gold that before he sought in the earth and with his hand, now he gathers with the mind in heaven.

O changes of things! Form well turned! The mountains, once pathless and bloody, now shelter robbers turned into monks, nurslings of peace. Once a land of blood, now it is a land of life; the godly violence of robbers is turned toward heaven, and Christ favours the plunder that seizes the kingdom above. Where once there had been the way of wild beasts, there now the rite of angels flourishes, and the just man lies hidden in the caves in which the robber himself lived. That old plunderer becomes plunder for the saints, and the murderer groans at his losses turned against him, stripped by right, as Christ despoils him of the weapons of crime. By Satan's fall in turn envious Cain perishes; Abel, alive again, feeds lambs redeemed by the price of blood poured out. Well done, Niceta, good servant of Christ, who grants you to turn stones into stars and to build sacred temples with living stones. You range through pathless forests, vast ridges, while you seek the way, and, overcoming the barren forest of the untilled mind, you turn it into rich fields. The whole region of the North calls you father; at your words the Scythian grows gentle, and, at odds with himself, with you as teacher lays aside his wild heart.

And the Getae run, and both Dacians, the one who lives in the middle of the land, and he, capped, a dweller on the bank rich in many cattle. This is to produce calves from wolves, and to feed the lion with straw, yoked to the ox, and to open the holes of vipers safely to children. For you persuade beasts, their wildness driven out, to join the gentle flock, you who imbue the wild minds of men with polished speech. In the dumb regions of the world, through you, barbarians learn to sound out Christ with a Roman heart, and to live a chaste and peaceful life. So the wolf is gentle in your fold, the calf feeds in harmony with the lion, the little child plays with the asp drawn out of its savage holes. The cunning gold-gatherers you turn into gold, and in them you imitate them, digging out from them living gold with the Word for spade: storing up these riches for the everlasting Lord, heaping up the sacred talent with these gains, you will hear: “Enter, glad, into the joys of your everlasting Lord.” With these, I pray, when the kindly house with its numerous holy company of brothers receives you in its choirs, add us too with the piety of your dear heart.

For thanks be to God, that with so great a love he has bound us to you by hidden bonds, so that no force can avail to break the inner chain. So, embracing your dear heart without end, we cling with a faithful noose, and wherever you go we shall be companions with following mind. The love of Christ, well poured from heaven into our hearts, so knits us within, that we are not carried far off, even when separated in a world apart. No age, no fall of the world, no other world, no death will tear us from you; when the life of the body dies, the life of love will live. While we dwell in these heavy limbs, we shall always cherish you with a remembering mind; you will ask that we may be with you together in everlasting time. For precious virtue will set you, lofty in merits, on the high summit, and will add you to the great towers in the city of the living above. We, as far separated in place as in merits, humble, from afar, toward lofty patrons, shall look up to you far off, a companion of the sacred companies. Who will give us this on that day, that we may stand in the shade of your side, and that the breeze of your rest may temper the fire for us?

Then, I pray, remember us greatly, and, reclining in the bosom of the holy father, with dewy finger scatter for us the raging flame. Now go happily, yet, though departing, always run back here to us in spirit; be with us, though you have come to your father's city. For God has given you to be teacher not of one people, nor yet citizen of one land; see, our homeland takes you to itself. Now divide your affections with equal piety between both: with your love to us, with your face to your citizens; abide, a citizen, on twin shores. Perhaps this homeland is to be held the greater, where you are held in the dwellings of hearts, not made with hands, and you inhabit a living city of men. As you are a bishop, so you are a worthy guest of kindly Christ, because, sharing in Christian minds, you dwell as an inhabitant in the Master's temple. Now farewell to us, and, loving us for all time, good to the end, run the good course and take the crown laid up for the just.

A law laid down for me by godly right, to celebrate this day every year with the service of eloquence, demands a solemn gift from my mouth: to tell of Felix in verse, to set my joy to a vowed song, and to sing the great merit of my dear patron, who, by the hard road, where the way is passable for few, seeking the heights through narrow places, made his way into the citadels above. Join in harmony with my songs, I pray, brothers, and applaud, and pour out your hearts in chaste festivity. Holy joys and chaste songs befit the faithful; for what man, to whom Christ is love and fear, may rightly not rejoice today, and come forth empty of his vow, with whatever resource of wit and tongue and means he can, when even the elements with festal colour reveal that the heavenly ministers rejoice with Christ? See the gladness of the world shine out in the splendour of the day with sacred insignia; glad whiteness holds all things; a dry rain is laid down from ash-grey clouds, and the earth is veiled with a snowy mantle; covered with snow, adorned with snow, the ground, the woods, the roofs, the hills bear witness to the white-haired honours of the holy old man, and they teach, as the angels do, that Felix, shining, possesses light and peace in the calm region of the godly, where milky fleeces glide in the silent sky. Christ, God of Felix, be present, give me now a word, O Word who is God; O Wisdom, give me a clear mind. It is not in the power of human eloquence to tell your praises; for your saints are your glory. I yield: let others bring precious gifts and surpass me in the expense of their service, who bring beautiful curtains to cover the doors, whether shining with pure linen or woven and dyed with coloured figures.

Let these polish smooth inscriptions with pliant silver and cover the holy thresholds with plates fixed on them. And let others kindle lights in painted wax and fit many-holed lamps to the hollow ceilings, so that the hanging tapers may flicker with trembling flames. Let these be eager to drench the martyr's tomb with nard, so that they may carry back healing ointments from the godly tomb. I yield indeed, empty of gold, to many more powerful, whose pockets, heavy with money, are lightened as the needy are filled, who with rich hand open their wealthy storerooms and stand by, pledging their souls with various dowries, equal in mind, different in means; and not less zealously let them dedicate dishes rich with food, wax candles, hangings, lamps, generous indeed but dumb: I, with the gift of my tongue, possessing no wealth, serve, paying what I owe from myself, and weigh out myself for myself, though a cheap victim. Nor shall I fear being scorned, since the libations of a poor man's service are not cheap to Christ, who gladly received with praise the two coins, the fortune of the godly widow. Then too rich men were bringing many gifts to God, filling the holy treasury with great talents; but Christ was the spectator, who, looking into the hearts of the givers, gave the palm to the widow; she had put the means of her daily food, two coins, all her substance, into the sacred chest, with no anxiety for the body. Therefore, from the very mouth of the Judge who is to come, she earned before the day to receive in advance the praise of her deed, and to be preferred to those whose gold her small coin had conquered, a poor old woman in her gift, but with a heart lavish in faith. So, good brothers, to whom favour has been granted here and there, turn your ears to me with calm minds, and hear gladly not who speaks, but of whom I speak.

I shall speak of things to be despised and yet to be wondered at: to be despised for my talent, to be wondered at for the merit of blessed Felix, which may not be told without the praise of Christ, since whatever we wonder at in him is from Christ, from whom the godly have their power, and through whom the buried have life. In past little books I have sung his homeland, family and deeds, and, going back to the very origin, I told of holy Felix, until he closed the times of his perfect life and, laying down his body on the deserted earth, went on to the merits of fellowship in the eternal kingdom. But since tombs do not hide the merits of the godly as they do their limbs, the life of souls, surviving when their bodies are done, experiences the fruits sought in the body, and after bodily death, not dead, it feels the good with joy and the evil with torment; and, recalled in time to come into the same body, mingled again with it, it will reap them in common with the body, received back undivided. So my material is long; as much as there will be of time, so much will there be to say on this, for anyone free to tell the deeds of Felix, if his speech were as abundant as his works and merit remain. For from that time when this day first laid Felix to rest with a blessed end and gave his flesh to the earth, his soul to the stars, from that day almost everything is seen to be done by the working of God's confessor, and Christ proves him alive even without the body, to show that there is greater power in the death of the godly than the force remaining in the life of the wicked. Behold, you see the tomb covering the martyr's sacred bones and the silent body kept under the marble drawn over it; no one appears to human eyes in the way we see with the body; the limbs of the one laid to rest are hidden; the flesh rests in a calm death, buried in a hope not empty of life restored.

Whence, then, does such great awe surround the threshold? Who drives such great peoples here? What hand presses the demons and seizes them against their will, and, as they cry out in vain with rebellious voice, drives them all the way to the martyr's tomb, and halts them as if fixed at the holy boundary? I look back to this day long ago, how sorrowful it was for the world left behind, how glad for heaven, when Christ, God, taking up the friendly soul, drew it from his chaste mouth. He added an ornament to the heavens, nor did he bereave the earth of its pledge; those above enjoy the mind of Felix, we his body; the spirit of his mighty soul lives there, and here his merit. But it delights to present the whole honour that Nola spent on the kindly funeral. For the city had lost a priest in sacred things and a parent in years, but, devoted, it would have him as a godly patron in heaven; it consoled its love with hope. So with all the crowds that pack it, flowing together, it runs, pouring out its faithful peoples in service. Then grief and piety come together in all hearts; faith, mixed with piety, rejoices and grieves. And though it believes that Felix, summoned by Christ, is raised above the heavens, yet it grieves to be left by so great a teacher; and what alone remains in a holy funeral and its rites as a consolation of love: after the bier had been set down at the place of burial, the people, pouring around in a rivalry of piety, from every side crown the laid-out limbs with a dense gathering, and a religious fight of lovers is fought in godliness. Each strives, outdoing another, to stand nearer the relics, and rejoices to touch the body with his hand.

Nor is it enough to have seen once; it delights to linger on and fix their eyes, and, where it is allowed, kisses on the exposed limbs; the people in harmony give Christ deserved praise and build the sacred honour of the resting place of Felix. Where a region far from walls and houses lay empty, a field spread out smiled with glad turf, flowering more richly in that place, as if already then, foreknowing the tomb always to be honoured by a venerating world, it rejoiced to be blessed by the sacred body, and the earth, lovely in spring's attire, so as to be more worthy of burying the martyr, strewed itself with fragrant grasses. But him, as he climbed the heights with calm flight, taken up from his chaste body, the glad crowd of the godly had come to meet and received through the heavenly clouds; and the angelic choirs, the ranks of the sevenfold heaven, running to meet him from all the gates where heaven opens, gladly carried the winged soul in starry triumph into the sight of the King and before the face of the highest Father. Then they adorned his sacred head with a snow-white crown, but the Father, with Christ as judge, added a rosy one too, and doubled the snowy robes with a purple garment, because each honour was his by merit. For he took the bright garlands as one carried to heaven by a calm death, but he earned equally the purple of a slain martyr, he who died a confessor. So he holds the rewards of one who suffered, because he was ready in virtue, nor does he lack the honour and adornment of peace, because he did not die in combat. So, the due rites performed, they covered the godly body in the tomb; but the grace divinely planted in the holy limbs could not die or be covered with the flesh, but at once from the laid bones a light flashed out, which from that time has never ceased until now to give signs of his mighty merit by healing powers.

And through all the age the world will last the same light will shine, guardian of the holy ashes through the ages. This proves the life of the dead martyr, and the good gifts of Christ, working at the tomb of Felix, spread over all lands far and wide the wondrous name of Felix, and ennoble Nola, alone above all cities deemed worthy of so great a guest, which the grace of Christ has so enlarged by Felix's merits that, increased, see, with new citizens and walls, here too there is a city, where at first there was a poor tomb, which, in a savage time, when religion was a crime under the threats of the profane, the Lord's people had built cramped, trembling amid swords and fires, as the ancient age has handed down to later generations. A small roof had shut in an immense light, and once a sacred corner was the possessor of so great a deposit; it, conscious of the hidden light, stood out like a fountain for ample buildings and remains in their midst like a jewel set among the roofs, spreading the spacious courts of the sacred tomb through five basilicas, whose summits, seen from afar, offer the eye the likeness of a great city. Yet these roofs, ample as they are, are outdone by the crowds, because, as faith grows, the grace of Christ overflows, which grants the peoples to have Felix alive by his gift of healing. He, enduring even after his bodily life, himself presides over his own, holy in his bones; and the bones of his holy body in the tomb, not covered with the dust of death, but endowed with the secret seed of eternal life, breathe the life-giving fragrance of a victorious soul, by which mighty healing is given to the sick who pray.

How great the power and glory that will surround the risen one may guess, when so great a grace surrounds the buried, and with what beauty the bodies restored to life will shine, when there is so great a light in their dark ashes! What will the crowns of these not suffice to grant to us, the least, whose very ashes give benefits to the living? It often delights to see the wonderful spectacles, in varied forms, of those who greet him, each asking for what suits his prayers; you might see even farmers from the countryside not only bringing their children in their fatherly bosom, but often leading in sick cattle with them by hand and freely commending them to the saint as if he were visible, and soon, trusting that healing has been given to their prayers, rejoicing in God's help experienced, and now believing them well, and indeed often, healed quickly under the very threshold, leading their animals back glad to their homes. But since it is long and pointless to run through all the miracles that Felix does by the power of Christ, I shall bring out one wonderful work of many, like countless others; but judge from the one those left aside, which the same power did, differing in their occasions. Open your hearts, I pray; the wrong to you is short while I tell a great work in few and slight words. And, remembering the widow told of at the start of my discourse, whom God, judging by the value of the mind, not of the gift, preferred to those who sent much, since she gave all, bear with me too as I tell great things in a light account. For my words also rival those mites, to which piety gave a golden value though they were cheap.

A certain man of slender means, plebeian by origin, rustic in way of life, was supporting his narrow poverty from a pair of oxen by hiring out their yoke, now accustomed to put them under wagons to carry loads over an agreed route, now having the return of his poverty from hiring them out for work under others' ploughs; his anxious hope and his whole property, poor man, was that pair. His children were not dearer to him, nor he himself; but he counted them as his children and as himself; nor was his care less to fill his steers than to bring up his sweet children; he was rather more sparing with his children than with his dear cattle; not with cheap grass or barren chaff, but in a sunny shelter, himself cold, and with the grain denied to himself and his children, himself hungry, he fed them, needy for himself, rich in them, whose fruitful labour fed the needy man to the full. These, then, so dear a comfort of his life, the wretched man, buried one night in heavier sleep, lost, driven off by the theft of a silent robber; and rising at the return of day to yoke them as usual, the unhappy man first sought them in the empty stalls within, and then outside, in vain, in the familiar fields; but soon, weary of fruitless wanderings to and fro, after he sees that the tracks give no sure signs, his hopes frustrated and his search come to nothing, he despairs of human help, and, filled with piety, as God breathed on him, he lifted to heaven the mind cast down in his broken breast; and soon, his heart restored, with faith anticipating, he drinks in hope that his prayers will be granted, and seeks the holy courts of Felix in a swift run, and, entering the sacred hall with great weeping, lies prostrate before the doors and fixes kisses on the doorposts and waters all the ground with tears, poured out on the ground before the holy threshold, and demands back the steers stolen by night's fraud from godly Felix as from their guardian, reproaching him, and mixes praying words with complaints:

“Felix, holy to God, substance of the needy, always fortunate for the wretched and always rich for the poor, God has set you as rest for the weary and relief for the afflicted, as healing for the sorrowful, for wounded hearts; therefore, as if trusting in a father's bosom, poverty lays its head on you and rests. Holy Felix, who have always pitied my labours, now forgetful of me, why, I ask, do you desert me, stripped to the skin? I have lost my dear steers, your gifts, which as a suppliant I used often to commend to you, which your care kept with constant favour and fed for me. For your guardianship kept them safe, and your sufficient right hand made them fat, the ones this night has taken from wretched me. Alas, what shall I do now? Where shall I go, deceived? Whom shall I accuse? Or shall I complain to you about you and accuse my patron of forgetting me, you who allowed so dense a sleep to creep over me in my slumber that I should not feel robbers breaking my bolts, and did not break my hard heart with any fear, nor give light to the darkness and the theft? Or did you take care to betray the fugitives by any signs? Where shall I run now? Whither shall I be carried? All things are built against me in blind hiding places; now even my own house seems closed to me, where, desolate, my nurslings led away, I have nothing that I would wish to have, nothing that a grace not vain might offer, sweet to see and sweet as I labour, delighting a poor man with the sense and fruit of his little property. Where shall I seek these now, pitiable as I am? Or where, or when shall I find such, or whence shall I procure them, if found, I, a rustic, who had them as the only riches of a contented poverty? So give me back those same ones; I want no others. Nor shall I seek them in any region; here they are owed to me; these thresholds will give them back, in which as a suppliant I bind you yourself, and cling to you. Why should I seek robbers I do not know, or where?

My debtor is here; I shall hold the guardian himself in place of the thief. You, saint, are answerable to me, an accomplice of theirs. I hold you; you know where they are, you who by the light of Christ see all things, even hidden ones, and see far-off absent ones, and grasp them, since God encloses all, by whom all things are held. And therefore the hidden thieves, in whatever hiding place, are not concealed from you, nor can they escape you, though they be anywhere, since one hand holds them. God is one everywhere, the right hand of Christ gentle to the godly, but an avenger to the wicked. So give back to me, give back my oxen, and seize the thief. But I do not seek the guilty; let them go; I am not ignorant of your ways, saint; you do not know how to repay evil deeds; you prefer to amend the wicked by pardon rather than destroy them by punishment. So let us agree: divide with me thus what is yours and what is mine; let my interest stand unharmed through you, and let mercy claim your share alongside, and let your judgment stand with balanced scale: release the guilty for yourself, give me back my steers. See, you have the bargain; there is no longer any cause for you to delay your servant; hasten to release me from such great cares. For my resolve stands sure never to give way until you help me, nor to be unfastened from this doorpost; unless you hasten, I will lay down my life on this threshold, and you will no longer find anyone to whom to return them, brought back too late.” Such things he said with a complaining voice but faithful mind, weeping and praying all day without end; the martyr heard him gladly, for the suppliant was not flattering, and, sporting with his Lord, laughed at his reproaches; and, moved by the faith of the one asking, not by the boldness of the one grieving, he hastens help; the delay is drawn out a few hours. Meanwhile, as the day slipped away and evening came on, he set no limit to prayers nor to tears; his one cry, fixed to the doors, was: “I will not be torn from here;

here I will die, unless I receive at once, here, a reason to live.” At last, however, when the deepening night was now compelling the shrine to be made secure, and he, forgetful of time, mindful of his loss, pressing the doors with his face down, was blocking the bars with his whole body, the violent hands of those who had knocked at his ears in vain with many words set upon him, and at last the crowd tore him away struggling and drove him far from the holy hall. Pushed out by the sacristans, he weeps more bitterly and, mourning, makes for his house; the silences of the night resound with his lament, and the lonely places echo far and wide with great complaints, until, unwilling, he arrived. And entering the black inner room of his silent hut, again, from the very entrance under the roof, when he saw the bare stalls of the oxen and no bells giving their sound, as they used to rattle softly when the oxen shook their necks or struck the hollow bronze with slow tongues, while the herd chewed the cud in the throat, he renews his lamentation more heavily, as if a wound had been reopened; and although care denies the sick man rest, yet it gives this comfort to his wakeful grief, that he lies with his body stretched over the places where his oxen had been stalled, pressing them; nor do his limbs ache, broken by the hard bed; the very injury delights him; nor does he shudder at the filth of the dirty stall, because it gives back the familiar smell of his beloved cattle, and the stench does not stink to a lover. If there were any footprints they had left with their last steps, he looks at them, and with groping hand going over the trodden places he groans and rubs with all his limbs the now cold tracks of their feet; and his mind, though he is absent in body far away, he sends to the consecrated hall of Felix, calling Felix with weeping, Felix by name, nor does he despair of help or cease to pour out prayers.

Night, having now passed the middle of the sky, had flooded the world with sleep-bringing peace; all things were silent on the earth; only his hope and care kept him wakeful. Behold, suddenly he hears a noise before his doorposts and the doors resound with knocking, at which, terrified, out of his mind, he cries out, believing that thieves were at hand again: “Why do you cruelly wish to break empty doors in vain? I have no ox now; what more do you seek? Others got here first; only my life survives, which has remained, worthless as booty, for your companions.” He said this in fear; but the sound at the threshold continued without end. As it grew more frequent, and no voice of the knockers answered him, he draws near in suspense with hesitant step, and puts an anxious ear to the doorposts, and his eye to the cracks through the gaping bars, where the white colour of the sky shines in amid the darkness, and he looks long and explores, and still does not trust himself as to what he sees; for in the dim light of night there is no clear faith for the eyes; yet through the shadows the very bodies of the knockers, though doubtful, began to take away his trembling fears and to promise hope of good by their shapes. He does not see men knocking; but what he sees to be true he does not dare to believe. I will tell great things, though small miracles for God, for whom every living creature has sense, by which the Creator himself has ordered cattle of every kind. Behold, bearing a mind led by divine power, the notable pair of oxen, through pathless places unknown at night, had come to the known house with no drivers, as if of their own accord, yet not of their own accord, because Felix, guiding them with hidden reins, had driven them by divine action, snatched by a stronger hand from the robbers.

And after they had reached the familiar straw roof of their house, rejoicing at their return and fearing the hands they had experienced with lively remembering terror, as though they feared the robber pressing on behind them, they began to shake the doors with their joined foreheads, and to use their horns as hands, to rouse their master by the sound. But he, terrified again, as at a hostile uproar around his bolts, feared even what was safe; again wisdom breathes on the brute cattle to sense the reason for his delay and to open the understanding of their fearful master: they give a lowing, by which, his fear driven off, he might securely open the way to his shut-out nurslings. He, seeing the unexpected tokens of the divine gift, still hesitates, and even his joys trouble the trembling man. He does not dare to believe, he fears not to believe; he sees them close by and thinks his eyes are dim; while he looks at himself, he distrusts that he could have deserved so much; but, reflecting on the other hand on him from whom he had hoped, he dares to believe, recognizing the deeds of Felix his patron. And now the twilight was reddening as morning broke the night, and with the flight of its last part, the stars thinning, in a half-dark light or with shadows glimmering, it had begun to unlock the doubtful colours of things. Then at last, the oxen plainly shown to him in their familiar look, as soon as their bristles began to grow clear to his eyes, now more certain, he exults, and removing the bolts from the bars he opens the doors, creaking on their loosened hinge. While he does this, the yoked steers burst in together and forestalled the efforts of the one still unbolting.

The doorposts yielded easily as the barrier was moved, and the oxen, glad, recognize their master, presented to them on the very threshold, and lick him in turn as he strokes them, and wet his feeling hands with their lips, and befoul his whole clothing with foamy kisses, while, pushing softly against the kindly breast of their master who embraces their dear yoke, they caress it in turn. Nor do the horns of his beloved cattle hurt him, and he draws their foreheads to his breast as if they were soft, and the tongue that scrapes even wild fodder as it licks does not seem rough to his hands. But even amid these things the faithful rustic, with no vain heart, remembered his duty, and does not care to lead his panting oxen first into the stalls, and, after their labour and hunger, refresh them with food, before leading them with him to the place from which he had earned them back. So he came, leading them back, and does not hide his joys in silent vows, and as he tells it he draws dense crowds to his words and enters the sacred house as all marvel. Those whom the wretched man had wept as lost yesterday, the same he now leads present today and shows the people the triumph of the holy martyr; and the steers themselves are led through the midst of the gatherings, lately the thieves' plunder and now Felix's spoil; the huge crowd makes way for them as they go, and the glory of Christ is celebrated in dumb cattle. But he, who had been the cause of so great a gift from the high Lord, standing out among thousands and weeping again, but now with joy, pays the vows due to the saint, not with heavy money nor with a dumb gift, but pouring out the living gift of tongue and mind; the poor debtor testifies with godly voice his abundant love, and pays Christ enough with this pledge, for whom the spotless sacrifice of his praise suffices:

“See, saint, your captives, before all the people, I lead as victor to you, and again entrust the conquered to you to guard; preserve those brought back, you who have deigned to return the stolen. But now look upon me myself, good martyr; for you see that something still remains for you to do, but in me, who stand close at your threshold with eyes almost blinded; for I have drowned my eyes in much weeping, lamenting not only in loss but also amid joys. You have removed the cause of tears; remove now the wounds born of the tears; having pitied, saint, the loss of my oxen, pity likewise now the loss of my eyes. You have given me back my cattle; in turn, for them, give back my eyes. For what good is it that they are brought back, if, with my sight failing, though present I am absent from them present?” The people present laughed at him complaining so. But the ears of the hidden martyr, turned to him from afar, received the godly words of the simple suppliant, and soon his restored eyes felt the sacred right hand. Then, rejoicing, with his eyes and his oxen recovered, he went home as the people praised God, and the glad victory of a twofold prayer followed him.

If the stars can be absent from heaven, if grass from the earth, honey from the combs, water from the springs, milk from the udders, so will the praises of the godly be able to cease from tongues; in them the strength of life and the glory of death is God himself, for whom they willed to pledge their lives, and by dying to ratify the godly faith of peoples, and to purchase the sacred kingdom with precious blood, the blood with which the martyrs, sprinkling the whole world, became heavenly seed for countless nations. From the number of these chiefs, Felix, the confessor given to this city, shone far and wide through the world by the renown of his name. But Nola, made the home of the buried saint, applauds herself as for her own star. For every martyr, on whatever shore he lies entrusted, is at once the star of the place and the medicine of its worshippers. For the Creator, pitying the world dark with ancient gloom and the languishing souls in it, so arranged the sacred monuments of the godly on earth as he scattered the lights of the stars in the night sky. And though one faith, equal grace, and rival virtue remain for all the martyrs, yet in all of them we see unlike forms of works stand out. In some places we remember and honour lofty merit in silent tombs, in others we marvel at crying signs, conspicuous powers. Where, I believe, a harder impiety holds more evil, there a graver disease demands greater help; or where a blinder error still draws out the deep night of faithlessness, and faith labours, sick, in a wavering people, there it is altogether fitting that greater lights be kindled, and that the darkness of the world be destroyed as God illumines it, and that minds, astonished, with their eyes dazzled, and trembling, should turn toward the very rays of divine truth, from the foul gloom

to loose them and anoint them with the eye-salve of Christ the healer. This salve is ground on a godly whetstone by apostolic arts for healing the senses, because Christ's yoke is gentle and his burden light for those turned to Christ with a now pure light and with their breasts suffused with the gospel's juice, by which the mists are well purged with which the loves of the deceiving world cover the inner sight, loves that drive the wandering senses round through the great void without an oarsman, and dull them, captured by heavy fog, with soft enticements, so that they break the strength of life and follow hollow pomps through slippery pleasures. So, desiring to turn these diseases away from us, the all-healing Lord, with saving kindness, gave forth saints as physicians to sick mortals through various nations; and so that divine power might show its care more clearly, he brought them into the more powerful cities; and though small towns keep some martyrs, yet God brought the chief ones themselves into ample walls and distributed them, when dead, in a few regions, the very ones whom before their death he had given as teachers to the whole world. Hence he fixed Peter and Paul in the Roman city, since the head of the world needed chief physicians, mad as it was with many vices and blind with darkness. But since God is more powerful to restore our salvation than Satan is to keep his captives even now by deceit, the darkness of the world grows thin, and now piety has prevailed through almost all, and life has subdued death. As faith grows thicker, error, defeated, slips away, and with almost none now left to crime and death, all Rome is enrolled under the godly name of Christ, laughing at the fictions of Numa and the fates of the Sibyl.

And when the godly crowd answers its holy shepherds with a glad Amen throughout the numerous folds of the reigning God, a holy shout strikes the sky with praises of the eternal Lord, and the Capitol nods, its summit shaken. The squalid images tremble in the empty temples, struck by godly voices and driven by the name of Christ. The demons flee trembling from their deserted shrines. The livid serpent rages in vain with bloody mouth, mourning human salvation with hungry jaw, and himself cheated now also of the blood of cattle; the plunderer, groaning, flies in vain around the dry altars. So God, granting godly gifts to the other lands also, scattered his members everywhere through great cities. So he gave Andrew to Patrae and John to Ephesus, that he might heal Europe and Asia together in them and dispel heavy darkness through such great lights. Parthia embraces Matthew, India Thomas, Libya Lebbaeus, the Phrygians received Philip, Crete took Titus, Boeotia Luke the physician. Mark, Alexandria, was given to you, so that, the ox driven out, mad Egypt might no longer worship cattle in Apis together with Jupiter, nor Crete wrongly worship in Jupiter a citizen buried there, nor the Phrygians perform the rites of Cybele with their gelded Galli, consoling the impure mother with a foul wound; and so that at last Ida might bloom with chaste mountains, bringing back untouched pines on a carefree summit, and vain Greece might no longer consult dumb Delphi and, scorning it, might trample its Olympus, walking higher on Zion, where Christ, the gentle yoke, crowns the hill of his nurslings with a lofty summit. Diana too fled from Ephesus, as John drove her out, accompanying her brother, whom Paul, commanding in the name of Christ, put to flight when he drove out the Python.

Satan fled from Egypt too, where he had taken a thousand shapes, a thousand names fitted to his various monsters, so that he shaped holy Joseph into Serapis, hiding a venerable name under a deadly name, when yet the very form of the image taught the truth, in that a measure sits on its head, because once, when grain had been gathered before the famine as the Lord inspired, he fed countless nations from the breast of Egypt and filled the barren years from the fat years. But so that the saint might no longer be worshipped with profane honour, the secret mind of God sharpened the breasts of the devout people with goads sent in, and closed the worship of the unspeakable demon by overturning and breaking Serapis. No longer does wandering Isis seek Osiris in the Pelusian forests with bald soothsayers, who, beating their breasts, lament others' laments with their own grief, and then likewise, mad, their lament put to rest, carry on vain rejoicings, pretending with the same fraud that he is found whom, wandering, they sought though he was not lost to them. Alas, into what a whirlpool of folly minds sink that are empty of God's light! For what, I ask, is blinder than those who seek one not lost, and find one who remains nowhere, and some lament what does not grieve themselves? Choose what you are doing, wretched error. What do you worship, or what do you lament? The things you join do not go together; grief does not follow honour; you worship laments and believe things to be mourned which you think divine. If they are gods, they are not wretched; or if they are wretched, they are not gods, but are men, and wretched. So pity those who suffered mortal things, or worship glad gods; for this madness is plainly blind, either to worship the wretched or to mourn the blessed.

So is Isis a goddess? A woman a goddess? If a goddess, she has no body, and without a body there is no sex, or without sex no childbirth. Whence then does she have the Osiris she seeks? And does a goddess not know where to seek him? But a goddess can never be a mother nor a woman. For God is one, threefold power: God the Father one, and one in him the Son, and from him at the same time, one with the Father, the Spirit of the Word; these three names are always one God. The nature of God alone is God, which the Son and the Spirit and the Father are; but the Son is born of the Father, the Spirit proceeds from the Father. Nothing here has any nature among created things in common or like it. But mighty Carthage flourishes with Cyprian the martyr, whose fountains, poured out at once from his mouth and his blood, made fruitful the sands of thirsty Libya. Not far from there the White Mass raised Utica up with martyrs gathered in a great heap of venerable slaughter; for one mound of blessed turf, covering many bodies, has raised its head high over the fields, and testifies to lofty merits by the mountain of its tomb. Hence Africa, long since fruitful for God and Christ, multiplies abundant harvests from so great a seed and bears excellent teachers in word and faith. Nor did less grace shine out in the western lands. Ambrose stands out for Latium, Vincent for the Iberians. Gaul took Martin, Aquitaine Delphinus. And many other seeds of saints besides, abundantly spread through the same regions in the tombs laid there, illuminate the whole world with heavenly powers and thrust the ancient dragon out of the whole world, who shakes the human race with the art of harming through the thousand names of gods, which he, the snake, took from dead mortals for himself and gave to his own; a prince, he holds his foul kingdom in the empty air, and wanders about as head of the demons, our enemy.

So therefore this our Nola too, by the love of merciful Christ, deserved to be fortified and at the same time purified by the tomb of Felix, because, mingled with the blind ruins of the world, it also lay dying in the night, long polluted by worshippers of stones, in which the brothel of Venus and the madness of Bacchus were deities to the wretched, and lust, joined to frenzy, celebrated wicked rites with a foul ceremony. And what place was there here for life, where there was no shame anywhere nor any fear? For who would fear to sin here, where bloody frenzy and incestuous lust were religion? And crime was in place of a deity for those who had believed that there was any deity in crime, and in the whole throng the worshipper was held as it were holier who had grown hot more pollutedly in the rites of Venus, so that he was full of the god and more blessed than the rest, he who, with the demon poured more into him, raving more savagely against himself and offering frenzied rites with his own wounds, had deserved to lose a sound mind. O mind worthy of blind souls, and deities worthy of them! Let those who turn away from serving God have Venus and the grove as god; let mad drunkenness and impious love sanctify them; let them worship what is cut off and call the wretched shame of foul error the mysteries of the Mother. Fitting faith for those who, in the kindly light of truth, have no faith and no love for chaste laws and the great name of Christ, and therefore there is no value in the blood of Christ for an unworthy life.

Let their belly be god to them, or the other joys of the flesh, those for whom God himself is not God, for whom there is no glory in the cross of Christ, because the power of the cross does not deign to approach degenerate souls. Hence blessed Felix, like other martyrs in different parts of the world, was a physician to the people of Nola, and is so for ever with that help, and not only to the people of Nola but to all by whom he is implored, he will give health by this right, if the kindly faith of the cross be present in the suppliant's breast. That faith heals and expiates the human race; where this medicine is lacking, there will linger the whole kingdom of evil, nor will the Cyprian goddess ever cease to reign in him with adulteries, nor Lyaeus with frenzies, in whom the shame of Christ and the ardour of the cross are lacking. For a divine fire is present where the power of the cross within, as faith burns up, torments guilty hearts and gives life to the soul, the vices in the flesh being killed. Long crushed by these enemies and corrupted by such great pests, Nola needed a huge remedy, and therefore, God weighing the danger and the help, she received Felix as physician, to overcome every ruin, however ancient, in the black hearts of the wretched, and, more powerful by the strength of his merit, to cut open the callus drawn over the rotten ulcers in deep wounds, so as to squeeze out from the opened folds the pus gathered by the spreading corruption, and then a scar drawn with smooth skin might fill the hollow of the wound. So when Felix shone for the people of Nola like a star in the darkness, coming from the mouth of God and bearing the word of healing in his mouth, as serene Phosphorus, before the sun's coming, puts forth his glad radiance at the morning rising, and, new among the setting stars, shines forth as herald of the approaching day, as night gives way:

so now, as the gospel shines over the whole world, and as God draws near, soon to be judge of all lands, Christ holds out everywhere the standards of his coming and flashes his signs through his friends. Which of them did he wish to shine before him on this shore? Felix, so that by this star he might pluck away our shadows and drive the ancient demons out of this city too, so that, when such colonists were expelled from the hearts of men, God might enter as dweller into pure minds, and, the roles reversed, with us released by kindness, our former chains might now press on our lions, raging in vain against Christ's sheep with their bound ferocity. And this grace still remains for us even now, which releases us from sins through the entreating prayer of the saints, and, with the same saints as avengers, binds them and torments the enemies who used to bind us. These now, like thieves caught when a light is brought in and put in chains, now bear the fiery whips of the godly, as they deserved, or, wretchedly thrust into the infernal prisons, they tremble, confessing that the Lord's judgment is near at hand, grim only for themselves and for all their own, whom a sinister will has turned to Satan's side, and a life that copies Satan's has joined to Satan, men who are their companions here in wickedness, there in punishment. Behold the day acceptable to God; now the true light of salvation flashes; we see all things now turned well for us; deceits have fled, Bel has fallen, error perishes, and the demons who used to be worshipped as deities in whole temples are tormented, unarmed, throughout the temples of God, and those who dared to take divine honours are now punished, subdued under a human law.

For these, whom now in the crowded hall of Felix we see tormented, crying out, snatched about through the bodies they have captured, are held bound in those very bodies into which they thrust themselves, and of their own will they found that their punishment was human. So now, in the persons of the accused, they howl in their punishments, those who by false divinity had been gods, and who, with feigned divinity, had given living men over to themselves, men who before the worship of God saw nothing heavenly; these now, when by the light of Christ true faith has been revealed, cannot bear the buried saints. But to make it clearer that those demons who are now tormented before the doors or before the tombs of the godly are the same as those to whom once the slavish race of men sacrificed and madly poured out sacred honours, the very manner of their voices teaches; for more often they groan with that voice, so that you may recognize the familiar frenzy in the shouting. So often, as if with mouth loosed more widely, they gnash their teeth, foam at the lips, bristle with their hair, and, as if a hand grasped their hair, they are jerked up into the air and stand hanging by their hair, feet aloft; meanwhile there, remembering their old rites, in which they used to lick the entrails of slaughtered cattle or feed on libations and lead lascivious choruses in ivy-wreathed processions, even now bearing witness that those rites were theirs, in which a drunken crowd made mad uproars, panting, they imitate with broken voices “euhoe,” the cry of Bacchus, and toss their necks in slow rotation.

But since the life of one mortal could not suffice to wash away contagions drawn out over a long time in the few years which Felix lived in the body, confessor and presbyter, teacher by word, martyr by title, priest in merit and office, the almighty Lord made the bounded age of his body continue for Felix in a better way, continuing the healing acts of the hard-working martyr, so that, buried, he might perform the same works of power which, while he remained in the flesh, he did by Christ's power, and so that, though dead, he might not be absent in body from the city that had received him, since the healing spirit of the one laid to rest was present, and though the face of the dear patron, withdrawn for a time, lay hidden from the longings of those who loved him, a ready medicine was always present for the health of the sick. Hence everlasting honour and glory surround holy Felix, with merits flourishing without end; and though, hidden in his tomb from long ago, he lies in the covering of the earth as far as he was mortal, yet a living grace, God quickening it, surviving in his limbs, glorifies for the peoples the martyr's bones, which breathe the divine, as the merit of the buried lives, and a crowd thronging from various lands continually reveres the small throne of the great confessor. But God, as the sower of all men, granted that this help should go forth from the saints to all lands, so that now from their tombs the blessed martyrs might perform godly gifts and, buried, might heal the living. Nor was this gift enough for the Lord, that martyrs should illuminate only their own places by their name or powers;

the merciful one, multiplying the monuments of the godly even from the same tombs, granted the same saints to many nations. And I shall relate from the beginning the various causes from which this blessing arose for various lands. For since the first faith had not gone out equally spread through the whole world, martyrs had been absent from many regions of the world, and for this reason, I think, by a great gift Christ was pleased, now inspiring the powerful, as was first done under Constantine Caesar, now revealing them to his servants, that they should transfer martyrs summoned from their former seat to new lodgings on earth; as we know was done not long ago by the holy bishop Ambrose, who, supported by such a gift, after he had transferred to his own hall, changing their place, saints before unknown and then discovered with Christ as informant, confounded the raging queen with ready light. For when Constantine was founding a city of his own name, and was the first among the kings of the Roman name to bear the worship of Christ, he received in his mind a divine counsel, that, since he was then building walls rivalling the walls of the Roman city with magnificent undertakings, he should follow the city of Romulus in these endowments too, and gladly fortify his walls with apostolic bodies. Then he carried Andrew from the Achaeans and Timothy from Asia; so with twin towers stands Constantinople, the rival head of great Rome, more truly like the Roman walls in this eminence, that God compensated it for Peter and Paul with equal ambition, since it deserved to receive the disciple of Paul with the brother of Peter. How great a benefit for the needs of our life has grown along that road through the long divides of the earth, the very places teach even today, in which that carriage of the blessed, able to bear its load, rested at a halt in all the stretches, wherever there was a stopping place for the holy bodies and rest for those carrying those consecrated ashes; they cry out with wondrous signs.

For the divine hand is at work there with healing power along all the ways where the holy bodies imprinted living tracks in their sacred passage. Hence, then, as faith persuaded, the opportunity was given to the zeal of the faithful companions to wish to take for themselves certain pledges from the holy bones, a deserved fruit, so that each might bring home, as the wages of service and the price of labour, protection for private use. From that time the sacred ashes, like seeds of life, have been scattered in various places, and wherever, from a tiny bone, a slight dew from a small portion of a sacred body fell upon the nations, there godly grace produced fountains, and a drop of ash produced rivers of life. Hence the abundance of Christ, rich even in the least things, has dripped on us too; for this also we have received here: sacred pledges of apostolic flesh in a little dust, which holy Felix, lord and father of our dwelling, guardian of our soul and protection of our salvation, received in the building nearby, close to himself, which, more recent in age than his other halls, keeps slight ashes and great honours, and is itself rather kept by its patrons as guardians; for far be it that those should ever seem to need keeping who are wont to keep; yet they deign to care for the interests of their nurslings with fatherly love and to cherish the protection of places dedicated to them; that this zeal of piety is in the holy spirits they have given proofs of wondrous faith. So I shall tell in a few words a recent work; for it is fitting to set forth the gifts of holy Felix on his very birthday in thankful words. I shall not speak of things foreign in place or ancient in time;

I shall relate a work done lately in our borders and in this seat, which you will perhaps readily recognize, since the matter was done in the open light. I believe that of this number hardly anyone of you will be new to hearing it, since flying report has gone far to distant people. Certainly some of you were present in this city at the time when it happened that a thief, driven in mind by unlawful goads, put greedy hands on the sacred gifts, and, shameless and mad, out of all the insignia of the venerable hall chose one as booty: the form of the cross, not knowing that it would be his betrayal, not his spoil, which, like a greedy fish swallowing a hook, he gulped down, to be caught by the bait he had taken. Who, I ask, drove the robber to a venture of so great a spirit, armed him, blinded him, threw him headlong, so that neither from the watch of the guards nor, what is more, from the very altars which cover the revered sacred ashes and breathe the power of the holy dust, did he flee with a struck heart, and that he took the object outstanding not only in divine power but also in beauty and value? For there were many other ornaments, as you know, in that very place which he could take, sparing the gold of the cross; for within lay hidden the mystic vessels entrusted for receiving the sacraments. But besides, in the space of the hall itself there were gifts notable in various forms, placed according to custom, which you see there ready every day, or fixed round all the columns in measured order, like candelabra, which carry painted candles on a projecting spike, so that fragrant lights may be given by the papyrus wicks enclosed.

And in the middle space, fixed to the high ceilings, hollow lamps hung on bronze chains, which, in the shape of trees, as if like vines, throwing out arms with pliant rods, carry on the highest tip of the branch little glass cups as their fruits, and as if blossoming with kindled light they flower and imitate the dense stars with many-haired flames, and pick out the heavy darkness with numerous lights, and paint the tender air with flowering little fires, and while they tremble their liquid hair and flash frequently, the gloom of night scattered by constant torches, they mingle an uncertain face between light and shadow and confuse the doubtful air for trembling eyes. So although this man saw these ready for him in the open, and safer for him to steal, since there would be less crime and less value in carrying off a light lamp of silver, hanging farther from the edge of the altar, yet the wretch, ambitious and proud even in fraud, scorned to take silver by theft as a cheap crime, and stretched his bold right hand to the golden things, which he had seen skilfully set off with various little stones, and had puffed up his breast with great wishes, to rejoice, rich, in gems and gold together. But he remained heavy only with the unjust weight of a great crime, and light in money; his punishment awaits the sacrilegious man, his booty deserted the robber. Stripped of the spoil of theft, not of the crime, he lives poor in fruit, but abounding in the wound of fraud. Yet I would think that he was permitted to approach the crime not without the great will and counsel of Christ, so that, since he had admitted into his mind to take anything from the sacred things, he was allowed to come to those things in which the impiety committed would be more notable.

A few days before, the same man had fled there for refuge, pretending to flee military service, and was received in friendly fashion as a guest by the sacristans who looked after the sacred hall. Lying hidden there almost a whole month, he had explored the beds, the sleep, and the times of the guards, and when he had seized on the hours suitable for his planned crime, he committed the wickedness in the silent night, with no labour or noise, shut in behind closed doors as if one of the guards, whose guest he was; when the watchmen, no longer watchful, began to snatch their first sleep in the silent shadows and draw forgetfulness over their weighed-down cares, he took the place for the crime, where he knew from practice that a little machine, placed there for tending the lamps through the night as usual, offered a ladder with steps ready, left there by a guard ill secure for himself, where there was the likeness of a cross, as there is now too: an upright continuous rod carrying on a crossbar two little cups; a small chain hanging from its foot supports one. In these three little cups lights set in them shine when a festal day brings it; but then, without use of light, it hung only for show. But a little in front of the glory of the cross, on the same line, there is a silver cup fitted for use. This, shining with a light inconvenient to him, the robber at once puts out; for he also knew that it often used to go out, when the very dry tow buried the light in the long night with the oil used up, and that the watchman would not wonder if he happened to see the darkness take away the roof as the lamp was covered, thinking the night made by custom, not by crime.

So not as a thief, which, as a robber, he was, but as a guardian, the robber carries off the unlawful plunder securely, and does not flee, and stays fearless. One little cell of many hides him, of those which, set along the sides on every side by the great roofs, give secret lodgings to the buried. In one of these the thief is hidden; and when in the morning he sees the bars open, he springs out of the unlocked hall and, leaving his hiding place, carries off his crime; he was preparing to go to the city of Romulus, as he later told when caught, to carry on there the trade of his unspeakable fraud. Meanwhile, while ours knew nothing, that night and the whole day passed; late in the evening, attending to their usual duty, they set up the steps; when one began to climb to light the lamp, he found nothing; the rod of the cross remained bereft, stripped of its usual beautiful ornament. The wretched men grow pale and do not dare to disclose the loss by the crime, knowing that the guilt rightly fell on them. They go off trembling and hurry after the robber, pursuing the fugitive. Nowhere do they find any traces of the one who had slipped away. All go to different roads and search the harbours on different shores. Eight or ten days slipped by for the vain searchers, and when all had returned with an empty search, one boy among the searchers, himself frustrated in a labour spent in vain over a long region, was returning, and, coming now near to Nola, he stops on the very road, and with a great groan and pouring tears, calling on Felix, he resolves with faithful heart not to return home except with the cross; and soon he readily retraced the journey he had finished. And straightway there meets him a certain man, who knew the thief, not as a thief, but as a citizen. Our boy first asks him whence he came as a traveller; he tells him. Again he is asked about the thief, whether he had seen him; and he answered that he was staying in places near there, and that region (which he named) was near them, as they spoke, joined to Mount Vesuvius, the fifth milestone from the city of Nola. But the onset of evening delays the plan. They agree that the next day's light should again join them together. Morning comes, the informer returns;

he leads our men there, the thief is caught, the booty brought back. It happened that the holy day had dawned that brought back the birthday of blessed Priscus, whom Nola also celebrates, though he was bishop of Nuceria, another city. See, into the very hall of holy Felix, which then the people packed with solemn honour, when the bishop was now dismissing the godly assemblies after the sacred rites, at a time divinely provided, to meet the people as they came out, he is suddenly brought in, his thieving hands tied behind his back. The people are filled with joy, the robber with fear, and the whole city runs together as to some strange monster. The crowd, raging with popular hatred, went at him; joy and anger mixed uncertain uproars. I was greatly afraid, I confess, that the devil, with that envy he is wont to have, might violate the procession with blood, and treat one wound first with a worse wound. He is snatched from the people and shut in the very cell, as it happened, now that the guilty man was caught, in which he had hidden when he snatched the cross; the cross recovered, he himself is shut in, that he may live. Then, having recovered his mind, the guilty man began to tell of his crime and its obstacles in wondrous ways, and confessed that through those eight or ten days, in which he had prepared to go to the city of Romulus, he had been driven back with his feet entangled, so that, always preparing to go, he always came back, something drawing him back, and returned again to that region of Vesuvius, in which he had been ordered to be shut up as in a prison, an angelic hand binding him; yet he thought, wretch, that he was in his own power, because he seemed to be free in body, he whom, with no chain visible, a stronger right hand held with hidden bonds.

Felix, the avenger, bound him with a fitting wandering and drove the madman round in such a whirling that, always going away, he went away nowhere, and when he had begun to leave with springing step, he came back. Wondrous faith! He went while standing, remained while going, not knowing that by that very thing for which he was preparing to flee it was brought about that he did not flee, and that his chains stayed with him, and that his own crime was an unbroken chain for him. For he had entrusted the weight of his booty to the closed fold of his garment, and hence, greedy, as if captured in mind, seeking a hiding place, he still wandered in broad daylight in open fields, and, thinking he was hidden, stood out on the clear plain. Guilty impiety had so blinded his mind that neither did he escape by fleeing nor was he concealed by wandering. With opposing feelings, fear on one side and stupor on the other had confused his guilty soul; he avoided the paved roads, he feared, sluggish, to approach the secret woods, fearing that even in the woods the very silence might cry out his crime, or thinking that grim monsters of avenging beasts would meet him in their shapes. Then the wretch, withdrawn from the busy highway, was wandering near some houses in a certain countryside, pretending to be at ease to those who did not know, but pressing fear in his heart as he pressed his crime under his clothing; for his garment, girded up high, had stored the gold shut in its folds. For he had not dared to entrust his theft to the silent earth or to hollow caves as robbers do, fearing betrayal, too greedy to entrust his fraud. So the wicked man had entrusted his thefts only to his tunic, where he had knotted his garment, tied back, hanging his flowing clothing up above a bare knee.

This storehouse of crime the robber had then built for himself in his own person, and he was fittingly bound by such fear that he would trust no one with a share in the wretched theft, so that he alone would have the contagion of so great a crime, and the fold of the one whose hand had dared the sacrilegious plunder should become the guardian of that theft, that he should carry his own burden himself, and the deadly pack of his booty should weigh down and pollute him alone, so that nothing of him should remain free of impiety, he who, enclosing the spoil of crime taken from the sacred building, bound himself with his girdled garment and himself displayed the sign of his chains. For, soon caught, he exchanged his girdle for bonds, and as the gold fell from the loosened folds of his ungirded clothing, the robber, bound with the very strap with which he had been girded, the bold hands he had stretched out to the sacred gifts caught by the knot of his own strap, brought them back emptied of booty and filled with rope. But if we wish to look deeply at the whole series of the order of events, more and more in every aspect, both where the crime lay hidden and where, disclosed, it became clear, we shall see that Felix did wondrous hidden things by God's hand. We have already told many things before: how fleeing he did not flee, and how, his steps driven back, he retraced along his own tracks the courses he had covered, so many times in vain, his undertaking turning round, shut out from distant places and beaten back to near ones. Now I shall recall another work of Felix, which the right hand of Christ produced to show the merit of his dear nursling, a wondrous proof with an equal sign, which the guilty man himself, trembling, disclosed when he confessed his venture.

But first, since the matter requires it, I shall describe the likeness of the cross itself, which painting is accustomed to represent in two forms, either two-horned on an upright staff, or with its horns distributed in five points over three rods. The form of the cross is composed in a twofold appearance: now, standing up, it shows the appearance of the yard on the image of a ship's mast, or the sign that the Greeks use to mark three hundred, when it is fixed with one upright and, where it has its top, is joined with a crosspiece; now the same cross, put together with a different arrangement, expresses the Lord Christ as by a monogram. For the sign by which Latin reckoning marks twice five in counting, the Greeks write as chi, and rho is in its middle, whose top also holds sigma, which, bent back to the rod itself, makes o as if a circle were completed. For the stiff upright makes what in Greece is iota. Then the stroke itself, drawn back a little from the top, makes tau, and so the six letters, by which the name above every name is expressed, come together under one sign, and one letter is formed of three rods. So one sign expresses six at once, so that one sign with three rods may signify that the Lord is at once three and one, and that God is in Christ, whom the concord of the threefold mind willed to be born for us, taking a body. And there is a sacrament in this, that in each of the two rods the tips, as if spread apart, slope back at an equal end, but below, set apart in equal position, they stand on equal foot, and, fixed to one another, they cohere in a central joint, and their separate tops look out at equal heights.

Between these, set in at the central meeting point, a rod stands out more proudly like a royal sceptre, signifying that Christ, God, reigns over all things, who, with the cross extended through the four extremities of the wood, touches the world measured in four parts, to draw peoples to life from all shores. And since by the death of the cross Christ, God, is all things to all, for the rising of life and the end of evils, alpha and omega stand around the cross, each letter completing a different figure with three rods in a threefold manner, because the perfect is one mind, a threefold power. Alpha and o likewise is Christ to me, who, embracing equally the highest ends of the heights and of the depths, as victor took both the infernal and the heavenly, and, the abysses broken, penetrated the open heavens, bringing back victorious salvation, death overcome. And as victory joined him to the Father's right hand, he set up a bodily trophy in the heavenly seat and fixed the standard of the cross above all the stars. So that ornament, which the thief, driven by greedy furies, had in vain unfastened from its hanging hook and with polluted hand removed from the holy hall, is so made that, set in wondrous ways, it designs both forms of the eternal cross, as now, if you wish to view it close at hand, faith is ready for the eyes; for, restored, it shines in the very place where it was fitted before, and adorns the face of the altar enclosed by its veil with the sign of piety. So the same ornament displays that form of the cross which marks a balance weighed with an even beam and in harmony figures a yoke with a pole set upright, or, as the brows join the eyes across the forehead, the tall tree imitates the face with crosswise horns, on which the Lord hung as the world trembled, pouring out innocent blood for the sinner.

But below this cross, which a double bar joins in solid weight, at the lowest end of the extended metal, there is a little crown surrounded with various gems. With this too the Lord's cross, girded as with a diadem, shines out with the eternal image of the life-giving wood. This alone, of the whole body of his theft, that thief left untouched by the iron with which he had broken the rest; and when, as he was caught and ungirded, his clothing undone, the fragments of the booty slipped out and fell, the sight of the thing then confused the hearts of the finders themselves with mixed feelings. They rejoice at what is found, but grieve at what is broken; when they begin to seek the reason, marvelling at the robber, cautious and bold at once, blind in what he broke and cautious in what he left, then he confesses to the astonished men his crime and the divine power; for he had cut up everything, in his mind, but this one thing he had kept by divine power, in that the cross enclosed in it forbade the robber, however bold, with a power that made him sluggish. He himself confessed the crime of his mind and, bearing witness to the power of the cross, said that as often as he had armed his hands against that crown joined to the cross in close fitting, they had fallen as if broken, the blow recoiling, and his sick arms had grown numb, their sinews loosened. Here it pleases me to rise up briefly against the wretched thief: Unhappy man, what madness had so turned your mind that, caught by so great a light of truth, you did not hasten to forestall every search, flying back, to bring back your theft of your own accord? Did so great a force crush your greedy mind with darkness that you dared to hide in your bosom that part which, as God kept you off, you so often feared to violate?

Tell me, where did that fear of yours flee, and whence did it return, so that headlong boldness so badly hardened your fearless sense? A fearful scorner, you went away both the same and different toward the same form of crime, mixing faith with faithlessness in a divided heart. Did you believe in the power of the cross and the inviolable sign of Christ by fearing to touch it with iron, and deny by carrying it off what you knew in fearing? But your impiety did not profit you, and you, having confessed your folly and the divine signs, have made us exult in a great triumph of the cross. So let us now leave off attacking the captured thief, for whom the poverty of a fraud stripped of its spoils is punishment enough. Now to you, venerable cross of God, I turn my words, and, having spoken, I shall end with thanks in your praise: O cross, great kindness of God, cross, glory of heaven, cross, eternal salvation of men, cross, terror to the wicked, strength to the just, and light to the faithful. O cross, you who granted that God in the flesh should serve salvation on earth and that man in God should reign in heaven; through you the light of truth was opened, impious night fled. You destroyed the shrines, overturned for the believing nations; you are the harmonious clasp of human peace, reconciling man through the covenants of Christ the mediator. You have become a ladder for man, by which he can be carried to heaven. Be always a pillar for the godly and an anchor for us, so that our house may stand firm and our fleet sail well, resting on the cross, gaining by faith a crown from the cross.

Good masters often serve their dear nurslings with godly mind, protect their subject slaves with fatherly love, and favour with closer care those to be cherished whom, with searching affection, they see more in need of help and lacking strength. And if one of them, as the solemn custom of human usage demands, wishes to celebrate some vow and cannot accomplish it with his needy resources, the poor slave is cared for by his master's zeal, and the master, rich in wealth, gives him what the poor man lacked, the expense of a heaped table. This is the condition given to me under Felix as patron; let nothing be mine from myself, so that all things may be mine through him; for at his birthday now, as indeed before in past years in which this day flowered for me, I had no means to prepare a solemn feast for my vows, and the day was pressing, and no ready means was yet at hand from anywhere; suddenly, behold, my abundant patron gave me the means to set out a lavish banquet: two pigs along with a heifer; and with their flesh we fed the poor, and we took the material for our song from these same animals, since God lately produced miracles with remarkable signs through these very animals, goading men by deep reason to attend to Christ and not to prefer the desire of the flesh to faith; for the sequence I must tell will teach that God has given the highest signs through cattle lacking human reason, to the lamentable shame of our avarice. I shall not sing fictions, though I use the art of poetry. I shall tell with historical faithfulness, without a poet's deceit; for far be it from a servant of Christ to utter falsehoods. Let these arts please the nations, as they worship false things;

but for us the one art is faith, and our music is Christ, who taught a wondrous peace of once discordant harmony to come together in himself, the harmony he brought together into one body by taking up man, he who mingled kindly God with man by infusing his power, to establish the two in himself and to make natures far apart into one; so that God might be man, God was made man, made so by himself, who is God from God his Begetter, to whom it is not by grace but by nature that he is the only heir of the highest Father, alone having as his own what by gift he grants to have to those whom kindly faith has given to merit divine things. He, then, is truly the author of our music, he is the true David, who restored the lyre of this body, lying long with its rotten frame, and, when it was silent with its strings broken by the ancient crime, the Lord repaired it for his own use by taking it up, and, joining mortals to God, made all things flourish again in the likeness of their first form, so that all things might be new, as old decay departs from all. To renew this lyre, God himself, the master, himself hung his own lyre, once laid aside, on the tree of the wood, and renewed it by the cross that kills the sin of the flesh. And so he composed one mortal lyre, fitted to heavenly measures, out of various nations, joining peoples of every kind into one body. Then, the strings struck by the plectrum of the Word, the voice of the gospel lyre fills all things with the praise of God; Christ's golden lyre in the whole world sounds through countless tongues in one melody, and new songs answer God on matched strings. But I shall turn my foot back to what I began; for it is time and the hour to offer the promised dishes, to set before you a meal to be taken chastely through attentive ears.

I shall not fetch from an ancient age what I am about to tell; I shall speak of things seen here a few days ago. A certain man had come here to pay a vow that pleased him, a stranger to our seats from the territory of the city of Abellinum. He had brought from there a pig prepared with careful attention and long kept back, so that it might grow in years and fatness alike; and when he came, he slaughtered the fat animal of his vow, as is the custom of those who vow. Report had kindled keen hunger for great portions in the mouths of the needy, and all the old men, in hope of a large share, stretched their gaping throats toward the rich feast. Meanwhile the needy giver divides the cut meat in unequal parts: he takes away for his own the middle flitch, and cooks only the innards of the cut belly, and distributes only the vitals of the slaughtered pig to the poor, and leaves himself the whole body, and thinks he has fulfilled his vow, and gladly begins to return, daring to put those remains on his beast of burden with him, and wrongly believing that in them he was carrying home holy pledges of the vow that pleased him, in which the same miser was carrying the loss of his soul and a knot for his road. In short, he had soon gone not even a thousand paces on the way, in bright daylight and on a level road, with no darkness to frighten nor rough places to trip him, when he slipped from his horse, and, as if fixed to the ground, he could not rise again, trying to stand with renewed strength, and began to cry that his feet were bound, and to prove it, lying there, with his soles joined as by a fetter. Here another wonder is joined to the same event;

for while the sorrowful crowd of his relatives stands around him lying there in such weakness, the beast of burden, which still had only the pork as its load, left empty of its rider and driver, of its own accord, with no one turning it, reining itself in, as if it knew the cause of the stumbling, or had seen someone forbidding the road on which it had begun to go, fled, turned back its path and course, and ran back with hastening step to the house of its hosts, flying ahead of all those whom attentive care for the fallen man held, as little by little the faithful company carried him in broad daylight back into the holy halls, the sick man's heavy body borne up by their hands; he was straining as if with a broken body, his stiff knees refusing to walk, confessing with tearful voice the blind bonds of his feet and at the same time the deserving cause of his fall and punishment, and praying to be brought back to the very threshold of Felix the physician, to find sure healing there soon. As he was carried by hands and through the crowds into the sacred courts, the throngs marvelling, the old men set out on long benches in a threefold company were astonished, the pitiable common crowd of the needy, and the white-haired mothers sitting with them in their ranks. Besides, many whom their devotion had brought to the holy buildings from various distant shores saw the godly sign, since at the same time, indeed on the same day, there was so wonderful a change of things. The same man who a little before had left the same threshold on his own feet now, brought back, is carried in on others' feet, hanging, his body borne up.

Elsewhere, with none of the followers to watch it, the horse, still laden with the pork, stood before the doors of the host, nor had anyone well known to it stood by, who had the care to relieve it of its burden and lead it, returned, into the familiar stable. Yet it, as if filled with human reason, stood like one looking for his own and waiting for them at once, keeping its tracks fixed in one place, twitching its ear and blowing through its nostrils, seeking the known smells of the men it was used to. The hosts wondered what flight, what state of the horse this was, and the strangeness of the thing made the familiar animal doubtful to friends, and there was no one to tell what had happened, since all were crowding round inside the man who had been carried by hands into the holy hall of the martyr, where the sick man, poured out before the holy threshold, his body thrown down and clinging to the embraced doorposts, fixed kisses as a suppliant and washed them with weeping, and, recognizing himself to be the source of his own pain, uttered such complaints, accusing himself: “Woe is me, who have deserved to take such a punishment, wretch that I am, in this seat, in which, if any wretch arrives, he is made happy! But I confess that I have received and suffer a just ruin, equal to my malicious desert, so that, a guilty man, I am now punished amid these very thresholds, burning, with a pain that both burns and binds my feet, on which, alas, mad that I was, violating faith by fraud, I turned the gifts of my offered vow into the loss of my salvation. Yet there is, there is something, I confess, that I can say: that now the sad things are changed for me into glad by a welcome turn, and that, as my mind looks to better things, with the evils broken, the very punishments have begun to grow sweet, from which this very grace now comes well to me, by which it has come about that so soon I, wretch, am allowed to touch again the venerable threshold of Felix.

For if this fall had been none, or slight, so that I could carry on the course I had seized, then I would have been more unhappy from my prosperity, because the guilt would have remained harmful, and I would not have felt the wound driven inward into the bones of the soul, with the flesh rebellious. For the vigour of an unharmed body would have hidden the danger of my unjust desert, and a hardened mind would have bound the guilty man inert, had punishment not bound the fallen one. So, mighty physician in the name of Christ the Lord, Felix, let this now be enough for you and for the mighty Lord, that not anger but kindness, friendly to salvation, produced my punishment, so that, bound in body, I might be released from guilt. Behold, the bad servant, the greedy runaway, you have rightly dragged back with chains put on him for his crime. An unhappy debtor, I am held, bound, burned, set before all as a model of divine fear. All of you, attend with trembling minds to these things which now you see me, wretch, bear as a lesson to the rest. For are some free of this error? But it pleased God that the example be made in one, so that my punishment may be a warning to those for whom there is no amendment. But now spare your wretched one, I pray, best Felix, spare willingly, help with favour; extreme pain urges me to repeat my clamorous prayers; be present quickly, lest hastening death forestall the physician who delays. But I know that this is the Lord's hand, which strikes and which will spare at your word; only hasten for me, weary and now failing, to loosen the chain, which you, saint, see, and I feel; as you secretly and silently bound the fugitive's limbs with a hidden bond, so release the returned one with invisible medicine.”

As he cried such things, clinging to the very doorposts of holy Felix and wiping them with kisses as he licked them, the godly crowd both sees and hears him in astonished gatherings; he himself, lying there, is even now raised up by hope and rebukes all delays and the slow services of his own people. He orders the pig to be brought and soon all its parts to be given back to the poor; he asks only that life be granted him, and that he be fed by the filling of the needy. His companions quickly carry out the faithful orders, vying with one another. They go to the familiar lodging; there the load is taken off the beast, the meat is cut into pieces, and the fire cooks it, divided, in foaming bronze pots. Cooked, it is brought in, in many wide dishes. The hunger of the needy, filled, returns thankful words to God and, appeased, asks pardon for the giver. Without delay, at once, the account of the vow being paid, that debtor is loosed within from the bond of the chain he deserved, and, his feet restored as the Lord pitied him, like a free horse or a bird whose net is broken he flies out and runs in the likeness of a leaping deer. A wondrous proof is held before the eyes. All rejoice at so ready a kindness of God and at the so powerful merit of Felix, that Christ is present in person in him, governing powerfully in both ways according to men's merits, so as to be physician to the repentant and avenger to the wicked. For see how great was the wrong of that fraud, by which the wretch had first divided the pig between the needy and himself, and there, where he ought to have paid the whole vow, had taken only the head and intestines of the pig for them, and had made the remaining part, the whole body, his own, imprudent and shameless; and yet, by that very fraud by which he had been wretched, he was soon made blessed, God changing the guilt by the scourge of kindness.

For such is God's judgment; so God, judge and father and king, tempers the weights of his lofty judgment, that he weighs out a calm justice for all with a moderate balance, and his power, lighter, mixed with goodness, warns the guilty first with a goad rather than destroy them with a thunderbolt, so that, if the stroke of the lash sent ahead has helped, salvation may return safe to the man who repents his misdeeds. But if anyone, warned by the terror of the sacred scourge, refuses to feel the blow, he will go away uncured, and, kept for death, will feel the full wrath. So that man, wretched before, then soon himself blessed, was healed in flesh and soul by such a remedy. But because he recognized the cause, and, recognizing it as he lay there, repented, he found in himself the merit of being cured, and in a short time experienced both: that by a just law the right and work of divine peace and wrath await all, so that avenging punishment may rightly await proud offenders, and kindness may pity and save those who confess. So, his bonds loosened, he was returning, eager in step, the same man who had quickly become weak from sound and quickly free from captive, with glad voice, leaping like that man once, lame from his mother's womb, whom Peter and John commanded at the word of the Lord to rise up into a leap on strong soles. This poor man too was worthy of the threshold of the Beautiful Gate, whom God himself, the God of Peter and of Felix, by the same power of his word has now healed among us, lame from a fall just now, as he had once healed one lame from the womb; by that help he was now going away glad; and he who had poured out sorrowful prayers within, in his wound, see, outside, with a sound body, was returning thanks: “What can I repay to Felix my patron?

What thanks shall I worthily return to him for so great a gift, healed so quickly of so great a wound? I set no fee for a physician nor bore the sad weariness of a sickbed; nor did medicine, more savage than diseases and wounds, attack my body with scalpels or fires or painfully biting juices of various herbs, as happens to those whom a human hand visits with suspect art and always strokes, trembling, with uncertain comfort. See, I, carried in a short space to the very throne of holy Felix and thrown down on the very threshold, broken on marble as cold as it was hard, lay in pain, and my only speech was prayer, faith alone was my medicine; I saw no physician present, and I felt one. Who was the physician here but Christ himself, or Felix, made mighty by Christ in the name of Christ and by his power? I perceived neither at that time, and yet he was present in both, either to rebuke me quickly as a sinner or to heal me as I suffered. Equal was the way, in different form, of the Lord chastising and sparing me. The healer and the avenger lay hidden from the eyes; the punishment and the healing shone forth. Now, with signs completed in full order, I shall go home rejoicing, safe with Felix as my physician and eternal patron; no longer shall I fear any dangers of the road that might meet me as before; for danger will be absent, because the cause of danger has been loosed. Faith not kept had bound me, and now faith duly kept has loosed me; yet may your love, Felix, I pray, always bind me. Tie this chain on me, by which neither death nor life may ever release me from you.

But all, whoever have seen my pains and in your merit beheld the lofty hand of Christ in great signs, ought to recognize how much good my punishment has provided for them, so that now they may beware of sparing earthly things for themselves and, while they grasp at gain, acquiring the loss of salvation. For if it was evil for me to defraud the poor of food from the flesh of a cheap animal, what of those who wrongly embrace riches with vain love, and brood over metals buried along with their heart, and show that these superfluous things lie hidden, which they guard, far withdrawn from their own use? What will they do? What will they say for themselves to you, Christ, they who have seized the share of so many poor and have provided no salvation for themselves from their superfluous property?” One dish has been served. Now we shall set out the welcome courses of a second table; but we shall bring the same meat again, though seasoned with a different sauce. For I shall unfold for you, with wondrous novelty, another wonderful work that Felix played concerning a pig. The event is earlier in time; but, passed over before in our little books, it has been kept to be sung at the present time. Nor does it matter at what time a work was done, since there is one worker in various years, Christ, who does various miracles in praise of his saints in all lands. Certain farmers far from our regions, tilling Apulian fields beyond the city of Beneventum, from their bristly herd chose for themselves one of many piglets while it was still pushing at the milky teats with its tender snout, and, caring for it a long time, they fed the pig for a vow, and began, when it was ready, to lead it to the consecrated hall of holy Felix, so that, slaughtered, it might feed many needy with its great body, and the martyr might rejoice in the poor man filled.

But the pig, heavy with fat that outweighed the strength of its feet, could not carry itself long, and at the first threshold of the road it collapsed of itself, and then could not be moved by voice, hand or goads. Its sorrowing masters left it lying and commended it, abandoned, to their hosts. Their anxious minds wavered in doubt; for their godly hearts would not call back the journey of the vow; again, to go to venerate the threshold of Felix far away empty of the vowed gift shamed them. So this decision settled in their doubtful minds: that they should choose for their vows as many smaller pigs of the same stock as the years to which that pig had grown, which remained inert, weighed down by its own bulk; for their devoted faith, preparing to hasten the payment of the binding vow, thought by such a reckoning to make up for one fat animal with several modest ones. So they came to this sacred place, and when their vows were fulfilled they returned to their lodging, not close by; for at that time the dense crowd with its usual throngs had happened to fill the houses around the martyr's hall. Therefore, content, they went into a cottage far from here in a secluded countryside, from which in the morning they were preparing to set out on their return, when the first dawn reddened, giving birth to the day. When the door of the hut was opened, their host goes out of the house, and the man sees the familiar pig standing before the doors in wondrous readiness, as if it were saying that it was present, sent by the Lord, and like one greeting them it licks the tracks of its rejoicing master, and grunts softly with a gesture to its keeper, fawning, and, sniffing, gives kisses with moving snout, and, as if it recognized that it owed the master's vow, presses forward and invites the slow knives with its throat.

Under what guide, I ask, did it travel roads through unknown territories, or what feet did it take up, to be able to run so far, that pig which, within short spaces, at the very start of the roads, gave out, weighed down by the bulk of its flowing fat? Certainly no hand carried so large an animal along the long highway, nor any fold of a garment, nor did its own mind compel it to make its way through so long a road in an unknown region, since even men vigorous in the reason of the mind, and easily guided through unknown places with a tongue to interpret, if they lack a guide to make the way clear to them, are entangled by blind error in foreign regions. Who then directed the pig's way? Whence its will to follow its masters, or its sense to be aware that it had been prepared for a vow over a long time? Whence did the beast have this care, which rarely stirs the faithful, that, as if it had stayed behind sluggishly, guilty by its own act, the pig, struck with holy fear, should take care to expiate by coming the fault it had incurred by staying behind, and atone for the vice of inert sloth, though it accompanied its departed masters with its service late? A wondrous portent is plain, given by heavenly command to so great a venture of a pig, that it went alone on a long road, and that the pig had so great a mind as to direct itself by a straight path through unknown spaces. And how great is this too, that as it came here from the territory beyond Beneventum, whether it boldly took the public paved roads of the highway, no frequent encounters caught it anywhere, or whether it made its tracks through hidden woods, no hand with iron, no beast with its bite met it. What hand led it alone or protected it on its way?

Surely, hidden by some cloud, it escaped eyes, or, snatched through the air, it came by wind rather than by foot, and, slipping down from a sudden breeze to its master's lodging, it stood, a four-footed guest, before the unknown threshold. I shall tell another wonder, a sign near to this one. For a heifer, of a different kind, from the herd, certain men, who had likewise set out from a distant home, had separated at first from the breast of its suckling mother and reared, pledged as a votive gift for our poor, whom, gathered here in a great crowd, the grace of Felix feeds with the generous help of many. So when the calf was already frisking with grown limbs, made fit for the vow by its developed body, they set out from home; but, as seems to be the custom of those who bring their vows from far away to be paid to the godly martyrs, to yoke the animal to the wagon in which they were to ride, they set about yoking it, though it was unaccustomed, yet as if gentle, its mind already subdued to human uses, for which its masters had taken it, small, from the herd and had made it share their house and food; thinking therefore that its wildness was tamed, and that it would give itself easily under the yoke with teachable neck, they coax it with stroking hand and try to lead it into the narrow space; and it, trusting that the touches were the usual ones playing with it, at first agrees and follows those who call. But when, brought near the yoke, it saw the reins and felt the straps being prepared for its neck, indignant at the trick and suddenly changed, it becomes wild, and takes neither yoke on its neck nor bonds on its throat, and, the hands overcome and the straps shaken off, it springs away from the group holding it and seeks far-off, lonely places, fleeing its masters and its familiar house.

Yet it does not rush far from the sight of men in the manner of wild beasts and hide itself as a fugitive in blind woods; for, fleeing its masters, standing off at a distance as they departed, it so fled that it did not allow itself to be left behind in the countryside. Finally, when it sees the wagon, yoked with a pair of oxen, setting out, it understands as a human does, and, as if aware that it was owed to the vow, begins to be a companion to those who had set out. Nor is it a companion for long; it scorns to go as companion of slow wheels, and, with an excursion as if mocking them, passing the groaning wheels, it looks back at the column of slow effort as it flies ahead, and no longer fears being forced to the yoke, and becomes friendly to the wagon it hated before and goes in front of it, until they came to the consecrated hall of Felix. There it stops its step of its own accord and comes to the one who calls it, and, as if bound by the vow, rejoices to stand in the very place to which the victim owes its own slaughter. That rebellious one, not subject to human bonds, is led to a calm death with no struggle; submitting to the axe its neck, unspoiled by yokes, to make food for the poor from its slain body, it gladly pours out its blood for the vows of its masters. To what end are these things? Is it for cattle, as the apostle says, that God cares? But he who made all things for our sake, as author works all things for us in all things, and through unknowing cattle makes signs that work for us, stirring brute minds through clear tokens to strengthen their faith and to trust the truth, so that men, teachable, their tongues loosed into words, may not be silent about the Lord, of whom dumb beasts speak by signs.

White peace, by a welcome turn of the times, leads the year on with tranquil light after the winters have passed, and opens to secure peoples the day marked by the honour of holy Felix. Triumphant Felix urges us to rejoice with serene minds, now that the darkness of dread war has been wiped away, because he too, a patron of peace, together with the fathers Paul and Peter and with the kindly brothers, the martyrs, has entreated the King of kings with friendly divinity to prolong the times of the Roman empire, and to drive back the Goths who were pressing upon the very jaws of the city, and to turn destruction or chains back upon them, who were threatening the last end to the Roman realms. So now, with fear driven off, as after rains are over it delights to look back at the clouds driven away, so it delights to compare present things with past. How foul was the night through those days that have flowed by, as the year slipped away, when frenzy, kindled by the motions of divine anger, burned in the Latin cities with the enemy let loose! Now likewise behold the gifts of gentle Christ's power; the enemies slaughtered together with their profane king, the victory of the boy Augustus has restored peace, and, tender in years, the same man, strong in arms, prevailed by the power of God and broke the mortal strength of the sacrilegious tyrant, as Christ overcame. But why should I say more here now, since the commonwealth shows that this is not a work special to my Felix? For this cause was cared for by many patrons, so that Roman safety and public life might remain.

Here Peter, here Paul, the chiefs, here all the martyrs, whom the circuit of the great city holds, countless together, and whom, through countless nations with its boundaries spread, the church venerates within the bounds of Romulus, kept anxious vigils together with earnest prayer. My Felix was among these as one of them, a great part in the prayers; but the sum of the gift asked is credited to all, to none privately. So I shall turn back my foot; for I have said enough on a matter in which nothing was Felix's own by merit; yet I could not keep silent, because a portion of praise from this too belonged to Felix, in that the highest power, the mighty King of kings, Christ God, had assented to all the saints together, among whom, mingled in the suppliant flock, he kindly heard Felix with equal goodness. I shall refrain, then, from adding public gifts to his own, and I shall sing the private honours of Felix, and set forth what he does properly here in his own seat. Whence, then, shall I begin the song to be woven? Which good deeds of Felix shall I relate? Shall I rather unfold the many he does everywhere for all, or tell the domestic gifts for which I am his special debtor? These rather I shall recall, which I remember well were bestowed on me and mine; and since in past little books I have told more of those which he granted partly to others and partly mixed with us, now from those riches which he has bestowed abundantly on us I shall weave this little book with grateful mind, and, against my usual habit, with varied measure, as he himself produces varied material for me every year, I shall change my metres, and in one series I shall go, not under one law of the foot of a given song.

For as if in the fruitful field of holy Felix new flowers have sprung up, two shoots of Christ, Turcius with godly face, Suerius in flourishing age, and likewise holy mothers and girls like them, such as was Apphia, that noble sister of Philemon long ago, whom Paul's letter marks in its address, and with them Eunomia, a maiden already betrothed to the eternal bridechambers in heaven, whom Christ, snatched from her mother's breast, dedicated with swift love as pleasing to himself, and poured over her the ointment of his name, from which, her soul's hair dyed and the chaste head of her mind anointed, she breathes the sacred perfumes of the heavenly bridegroom; she is the sister of Melania and as it were her daughter, at whose side she clings exultant, having gained a sister as teacher. Both together, bound by divine dowries, wear on their beautiful breasts, with cultivated minds, the varied jewels of virtues like living necklaces. These a numerous troop of nobles follows, and the holy crowd of a virgin company, of one colour in one fleece. Here Christ, in the beloved Lamb, gladly listens to Eunomia, taught under Melania as leader by her voice, forming the vessels of the psalms with modest measures, because, as God gives the measure, the little leader with chaste mouth guides the blessed dances, companions of the saints. So this grace persuaded me, as I meditated, of a fitting thing: with a song played in many kinds of metres to imitate a garden picked out with various flowers, as I marvel that the bosom of Felix flowers, filled with varied light like a rich countryside, with many guests sent to him with Christ as guide, and with children in a dense band as pledges to father Felix, so that he rejoices that his dwellings have suddenly grown through his bounds with cells everywhere, and that sober roofs at last sound chaste measures with voices fitted to them, and he himself, with full bosom, marvels at nurslings worthy of his lodgings both in body and in speech, and souls equal in virtue in unequal sex;

as on a fruitful hill of olives the old planter rejoices, seeing new shoots from the divine seed of Christ as settlers among his fields. So let the threshing floor of my song flower for me with a new meadow, and, in praise of the Lord, who is the founder of the mouth and of every art, let music run, serving with varied foot. And now let the elegiac follow, with iambics woven in; let the heroic hexameter be the head and foundation of the little book. A sacred day, to be spent in chaste joys and sacrifices, has shone forth with the praise of Felix. Learn that what I have called “praise” is said for “death,” because the death of the godly will rightly be called praise, being precious to the Lord, repaid to God. Hence the prophet too says in the word of God that praise is given to a proven life at its end, and the divine word teaches by the mouth of Solomon that no one is to be praised before death, although some do praiseworthy things in this life, and praise, which is to be sung at the end, cannot be prepared anywhere but in this age. But I believe that since the whole matter of this life, fluctuating and doubtful, hangs in a slippery state, and the wheel turns our age in a short time, rising and falling through rough roads, by which the course of this age must be unrolled, therefore Providence our teacher warns us that before the end no one ought to applaud himself or another, or be confident; though one walk upright in an honourable way, yet he should always fear the stumbling of the foot, until, his courses finished all the way to the goal, he grasps the palm of the glory he has sought.

Therefore the blessed martyrs, whom perfect virtue has raised to the heavenly crown, we all, their descendants in the confession of the Christian name, celebrate with just proclamations of the honour due them, who by shedding their blood for the holy faith sowed the good of eternal fruit, so that, if we walk in the footsteps of the martyrs, we may enjoy rewards equal to our fathers'. Hence, then, the days consecrated to the saints, whether confessors or witnesses consecrated by suffering, the days on which, having finished the day of mortal life, they passed by a life-giving death from the stain of the world to God, the faithful peoples observe with solemn joys, giving thanks in honour of Christ, like this day of holy Felix in peace, on which the old man once closed the life of his body, having first fought the battles of confession, but consecrated by a bloodless end; victor after wars, taken up on a day of peace, at Christ's call he left the earth exulting and made his passage into the dwellings above, not cheated of the martyr's crown, because he had borne the vow of suffering in his mind. For often the mighty soldier entered the contest, and always, the enemy overcome, the confessor returned; but God, content with a prepared mind, kept him, not denying him the martyr's crown, but adding also the priest's crown, so that, having gained the palm in a bloodless battle, he might also possess the reward of one who fought, with the purpling laurel of confession, and, wreathed with the fillet of peace on a priest's stole, the same Felix, God's confessor and presbyter, might be twice crowned.

This day, then, which we recall with yearly vows, is not the day of his contest, but of his burial, on which, the two substances separated from each other, the soul flew to God, while the flesh, returned to earth, rested hidden in the tomb. And rightly this is marked as the birthday of the saints, on which, having done with the law of the flesh, they are stripped of the chains of mortality and are born to God into the kingdoms above, and bring with them the glad hope of rising again. I have always honoured this day in such a way that I would think it more my birthday than the day on which I was born in vain. For that day is more fittingly to be mourned by me, on which, created into this world, I, a sinner, fell from the womb of a sinful woman, conceived out of black iniquities, so that my mother bore me already guilty. Cursed, then, be the day on which I, wretched, was brought forth from the iniquitous into iniquities. Blessed be this birthday for me too, on which Felix, born in heaven as my patron, rose to that power by which he could, having purged me of my dregs, loose me from chains and, redeemed, release me from the mournful death of my birth. This same day always recurs for all as the year runs round the world in its circles; but since every year grace renews the diversity of gifts which Christ gives to his companion, that Felix may give them to me, it is changed, and is not the same day that comes to all, bringing the varied themes of my songs.

So let us see what new thing this year has brought me, from which I may flower with new words. I shall not go far, nor take for myself from afar things past in time or absent in place. They are present, the gifts themselves are held close at hand; you all see the gifts given us this year, joined in the one bosom of Felix: slaves of Christ, once nobles of the earth, but now inhabitants destined for heaven, whom Christ himself, who had created them rich, has made poor in this world, so that he may carry them into his kingdom, cast down from the citadel of earthly honour: Apronianus, the glory of the Turcian family, a boy in age, an old man in mastery of the flesh's senses, noble by an ancient lineage of the toga, but more illustrious by the Christian name, who, with the glory of old and new birth mixed, is an old senator of the curia, new to Christ. Near him is a companion under an equal yoke, younger in age, Pinianus, equal in faith, himself a boy illustrious by ancient blood, of the family of the first consul in the chief city: that Valerius who, by consular lineage, holds the first name in the Latin Fasti, whom Rome, the kings expelled, added to Brutus, is the ultimate founder, far back, of the family of this Valerius, now a Christian consul. O happy vein! Though that man, having died in pagan error, does not grasp this good of his stock, sunk in the black lake of hell, yet we, beholding with faithful light the past and present works of the lofty Creator in the human state, marvel, and are amazed at the godly sons of the impious, prepared from ancient ages by the lines of mystical successions;

yet in the darkness of impious minds we see that seeds of light flashed out in the very time of the ancient night, those in whom, though pagans, mind and will were approved by the law of nature. Hence in some of their descendants now the vein of the ancient fathers answers from time to time; as that man, the remotest ancestor of my Pinianus now, chosen to set his fellow citizens free into liberty after the hard rule of kings, foreshadowed the rise of this descendant, who, pursuing pride with his ancestral mind, for a better cause drove slavery from himself, conqueror of his own body, and, the kingdom of the devil driven from his members, the chaste liberty of a faithful soul now tramples the yoke of sin in spiritual peace; and in this the boy, serving as a soldier in the consulship of Christ, reproduces something of that ancestor, that, taking counsel to set free, he dispenses to God the godly office in the work of redemption, thus far emulating his ancient ancestor, in that he frees his household from slavery, as that man freed citizens. But what that man had done in one city, and that small, in the first years of Rome, this man now does in many cities set in different parts of the world, kind everywhere to his own and to strangers. For he drives the servile yoke from the necks of very many free men with his holy wealth, releasing with gold from the chain of interest those bound by debt in the darkness of prison.

These, then, Felix, hidden in his bosom, has housed in his dwellings at Christ's command, and has taken them with me as everlasting guests. Glad now in these helpers on both sides, I dedicate a vow of three under one voice, one spirit speaking with the affection of three. Magnify God with me, and in wise and honourable songs, boys of one mind, sing psalms. As the ten-stringed psalteries sound when their strings are struck, and discordant strings come together in equal measures, so let the godly lyre of our frame resound, as if a threefold tongue sounded from one lip. For we are three in number, yet one in minds, and more souls come together in these three, whose names, set down, the heavenly book keeps: first of the choir is Albina with her equal Therasia; a sister is joined to this yoke, so that the third, the leader of the band with her hymn-singing choirs, is the mother Avita. These three mothers have two children of one sex, a twin flower, Melania, Albina's offspring, and Eunomia. These same are children to us men too; for those whom sex divides, piety joins together. With father Paulinus, this Turcius is equally a father, but age makes me a father, offspring makes him one. From different veins we are joined in one name, not both old men, yet both fathers. So this whole company together: three names are mothers, four are in the children, in the fathers two. For here is the boy, Melania's husband in the body of Christ, to whom God gave to take his name from the pine, so that the boy, born for eternal life, might take his name from that tree which flourishes without end.

For the pine, always standing with flourishing crown, always loving to set its lofty foliage on high ridges, does not change its appearance with the seasons (for under heat and snow it stands like itself with green foliage), and, fruitful, as a mother it holds within, for food, the tender milk of a strong nut under its crinkled covering, and its rich wood sweats out fragrant resin, so that the tree is not barren even in its timber. This tree, then, is a type of the eternal body, beautiful, fruitful, long-lived, lofty, fragrant, green. This blessed boy will be for the Lord like this tree, so that grace may remain everlasting for him. And now, planted for God, he lives, and with holy progress raises his fruitful head like the tall pine. He stands out for me as the first son in my own flock; but I have another equal light in Asterius, whom his parents, of one mind in true piety, established sacred to Christ as an infant, so that, like Samuel, marked from his first years, he might grow up vowed among the saints, God nourishing him. He first loosed his babblings under the name of Christ, and the Lord's name was his first speech, and now, born for the heavenly kingdoms with God as parent, he shines alike with a starry name and face. Godly grace made this boy also the brother of his father; for they were born together from the holy stream. Those whom nature had divided by generation, God, by his kindly gift, will carry as brothers into his kingdom. So let all nine of us, parents with our offspring together, be like one lyre with harmonious breast; let us all make of ourselves a lyre into one song, composed of different strings.

Let Aemilius come as tenth. Then at last, with the number full, the mystic law will sound in us together. For with this number of persons, on the tortoiseshell of peace, the living string will speak the saving work. Felix will be the plectrum of this lyre; with this plectrum Christ, triumphant, will strike the ten-stringed lyre. This lyre will sound in us, as Christ makes the music, a harmony full of perfect senses, if our peace is in tune with God in all its strings, so that we may be united in body, mind, and faith. For such a man fills out the lyre with holy laws, composed in all measures for life, whose life agrees with the sacred law in all things; for every string will sing with unbroken thread. Now to you, revered parent, eternal patron, my sponsor, Felix, most dear to Christ, I shall turn my speech and render thankful words. You have bestowed many gifts on me with varied presents; all things that produce the substance of the present life and the hope of the future I remember owing to you, to whom Christ gave me as a slave from my first years. If eloquence ran for me with the waves of a river, and I had a thousand mouths sounding with a hundred tongues, perhaps not even, filled with these riches from a gathered fountain, could I run through all the gifts of Felix, the great gifts the Lord Christ gave to his friend, which the confessor poured over to me, his servant and nursling. Which shall I put before which? Many great things meet together, different in gift but equal in weight, nor among them can I distinguish what I should choose to mention first; abundance confuses the ready distinction of judgment.

If I unroll everything, going back to the first beginning, all that you granted me with equal kindness at various ages, I could sooner count the hairs of my own head than relate your gifts toward me, good Felix. You first cast for me, by saving causes, the seeds of heavenly things, if I could but attain them. For as a boy, brought from the western shores of the Gauls, as soon as I touched your threshold with trembling step, seeing the wondrous proofs of sacred works teeming before your doors, where you are enclosed with buried body and are spread far and wide by lofty merits, I drank in with my whole heart faith in the divine name, and, rejoicing in your light, I came to love Christ. With you as guide, in early youth, I bore the honour of the fasces, and with you governing my hand and keeping my soul safe, I remained pure of the danger of human blood. Then also, as a youth, I cut the first offerings of my beard before your throne, as if you were clipping it; already then, the pledge of a dwelling sent ahead through my office, I fixed a dwelling to be measured out in Campanian places, you founding the future lodgings of your servant, when, breathing on me with silent mind, you bade me take care that the road leading to your house be fortified and paved, and that a roof rise in a long stretch adjoining your buildings, under which the needy first dwelt. After this the house, built with a doubled roof, grew, which now remains hospitable for our cells; the portico below serves the sick poor, and bears us, living in the roofs added above, in lodgings set upon it, and provides wholesome fellowship with the needy for our wounds under one dwelling, so that we may provide friendly benefits to one another in turn: they, praying, may strengthen our foundations, we may shelter the brotherly bodies of the needy under a roof.

So when, relieved of the twice-three bundle of rule, I laid down the axe stained by no slaughter, you called me back, and I was restored to my anxious mother on the shore of my native soil. Then, as a pilgrim, I went across the ridges of the Pyrenees to the neighbouring Iberians. There you allowed me to be joined in marriage by human law, so that you might purchase the life of two together, and through the yoke of the flesh the doubled salvation of souls might make up for the delayed salvation of one. From that time, although my life ran by another path, and I lived far away in another world, where Gaul, sounding round, is beaten by the tide of the Ocean sea, yet in mind I was never torn away from this seat, and I always clung to the bosom of Felix, and in turn I felt Felix stand by my affairs for every good, in all things to be done at home and abroad. My property and the defence of my property was Felix alone, with Christ's divinity appeased, always averting adversity and granting prosperity. You, Felix, always fortunate for me, lest I be wretched, were father and guardian with constant kindness. And when I was in trouble over the blood of my murdered brother, and my brother's case brought me the danger of his kinship, and the confiscator was already approaching my property, you, father, rescued my neck from the sword, my patrimony from the treasury, and kept me and mine for Christ the Lord. For with what counsel Christ then brought help to my affairs and to my life, and how mightily the care of Felix was present, the great outcome of things afterward taught, by which the lot and purpose of my life was changed, my faith renouncing the world, fatherland, and home.

Faith carried on an exchange of the goods given up in various lands, and, everything sold off, bought a cross to be carried. So the property of earth bought the hope of the heavenly kingdom; for the hope of faith is stronger than the property of the flesh. This hope, resting on God, brings forth an everlasting property; but fleshly property destroys heavenly hope; yet that hope, if it prevails with faith conquering, does not at once take away the property, but reforms it, well changed by divine right, bringing back an eternal property from a fragile one, and, removing it from earth, setting it in heaven, where Christ, the faithful guardian, holds what is entrusted; nor does he keep the deposit only in the amount in which he took it from here, but will repay the talents entrusted multiplied with interest to those who have believed, and will make himself the property of believers. And what property can be more precious than this property? If the whole world had been my private property, would this possession be better than the Lord Christ? And who granted me to be, even in hope, the possessor of so great a property? Who compelled me to scorn that property for Christ, so that he might turn Christ into my property? Who but you, Felix, always my great power, enemy to my sins and friend to my salvation? You changed my fatherland for a better provision, giving yourself to me in place of my fatherland. You broke our fleshly chains. You made us, freed from the stain of perishing blood, migrate from the shore of our native land to your family and breathe heavenly things with great souls. You, changing our lineage from mortal ancestors, will make our names, among the friends of the heavenly Lord and signed in the everlasting book, with the birth of our mortal origin transferred, blotted out for death and transcribed for salvation.

What had I like these, when I was called a senator, such as I now have here, when I am called needy? See, throughout the many halls of the blessed martyr, ample in space and lofty in roofs and showy with deeply hollowed coffered ceilings, watered with fountains and wreathed with porticoes, everywhere, on every side alike, whatever through these places is cultivated, celebrated, held in the name of blessed Felix, in all these spaces is my house. Nor is there any place joined to and set in his buildings which does not lie open to me as my property. But why should I boast of this gift, if, a home-born guest, I possess the property of beloved Felix under a visible roof of stones? How much more is it for me that Felix himself, by God's gift, is my house, in whom my life lives and possesses a house that will fall in no years? For that Felix's house is also my house, he himself granting me the lawful reins of his right, our boldness proves even by these services: that we have received companions under the hospitable roofs, and now all of us with equal right hold the rights of Felix, and are cherished in the bosom of father Felix as joined children: those whom you know, whom you see even now in the very roofs of Felix, guarding the lodgings marked out with me, forgetting the lofty roofs of their old houses, and remaining more safely in narrow cells near the martyr, in a small place, ambition scorned. For Christ is near to the modest, turns away from the lofty, and frequents the narrow roofs of a poor man's hut more than the lofty pinnacles of proud estates. So, as I compare the roofs I now dwell in with the summits left behind, what I now have with what I remember having had, judge, if you please, with just verdicts among yourselves.

What house so beautiful, what field so fertile ever was mine in mortal property, as Christ has now given me in this poverty, through whom Felix abounds for me, a rich possession with inexhaustible revenue? If I go back over my estates from my old census, whatever once was great for me in any matter was earth, and the windy appearance of an empty shape; or if it was gold or gems, that furniture was a cheap price to the good, a precious poison to the greedy. But now, empty of riches, or rather more truly free of condemned burdens, I enjoy a poverty carefree of having, nor do hostile chains have a fringe by which to hold one who is stripped. He goes out lightly, with an easy body, whom the enticing image of the deceiving world does not choke with any loves through its varied appearances. O poverty of Christ, revered by me and more precious than the whole world! You enrich with heavenly treasure those you strip of wealth; you purge them as of the rubble of earth, you destroy earthly things in us, and in turn you build eternal ones; you turn the losses of earth into the price of life by a new right, reversing loss and gain, so that money kept makes loss for us, and money not kept makes gain; but in a sinister way the same money poured out is loss. For it profits no one to pour out his goods except in the name of Christ and by God's precept; for what is spent on profane vices truly perishes. Luxury and ambition, in the great danger of disease, equal the crime of avarice, because in both there lies an equal cause of death, which shameful lust accomplishes as does the evil-counselling desire for worldly things.

In these riches you want me poor, best Felix, so that you may make me rich in life, and by a poor man's way of life make me exempt from the endless death to be paid by the rich of the world, for whom the deadly use of gold brings forth eternal fires along with the worms. You want us joined to you not only by living under your roofs, we whom you are preparing to nourish for yourself into the fellowship of eternal life too, and to lead to that form which you, made perfect in the image of Christ the Lord, bore on earth, once a man made poor from rich. For to whom does your poverty lie unknown, which, rejoicing, as a confessor you took on for the holy name, your wealth proscribed, and in which, until old age, you always tilled a rented garden, Felix? Therefore you strive to make all whom you receive under your hospitable roof like yourself in godly poverty; for an unlike form could not come together with you. For as far as the wolf is discordant with the lamb and light with darkness, so far apart are the way of the rich man and the way of Christ; for the broad way lies open, which, slippery, on a downward slope, tends to hell, which drives the greedy rich, pushed by their own masses, to be carried into Tartarus. But the way which is Christ's, which lies open to kindly confessors and martyrs, opens a steep road to few. This way, then, does not take in the stuffed; it shuts out the laden. Therefore it befits the servant and follower of the blessed martyr to be pulled tight, and, stripped of troublesome fetters, to become thin by wholesome poverty and smooth, so that he may pass through the narrow gate and climb the lofty mountain of the Lord. But why do I, imprudent in weighing things, set these things down in place of your great gifts, best father?

However great these things are for me too, yet they are small, if I speak of greater things. For what fraction of your works toward us is the reckoning of this gift, that you gave land for lodging and granted us to build houses to live in, when you, father, offered us even your inmost being? For what else but your inmost being did you bring forth for us, when, holy one, you deigned to open the inner parts of your tomb, reasons having been raised from the hidden dust, and willed by so great a sign to show us inserted into you by a special love, so that the seat of your body, silent and fixed through so many ages past, kindly one, you willed to be opened in our time, as the ash of the dust suddenly came forth? So I shall run over those riches of Felix in his praises with hastening passage, as lesser gifts, the many he has diligently assigned to us, now received in his bosom, nor will he, prodigal, cease to flow toward us continually with countless gifts of rich help. Not only supplying those things which the use of the body needs, he has added also those for which even now the favour of praise is sought and after us the name of honour is kept, so that he, buried through so many ages past, allowed his halls to grow or be renewed with porticoes and houses built by our work. He also revealed to us the holy secrets of his own tomb. I shall tell the venerable gift in a few words, so that it may shine as a pattern of the great kindness with which he deemed us, unworthy as we are, worthy of so great a love, that, letting our eyes come almost to the awful secret, he disclosed his bones as if to his own marrow. So I shall tell you in full order the reason by which he granted us to see things near his limbs and to touch the very chest of his body laid to rest.

The appearance of the place remains known to all: above the very throne of the hidden martyr, with the railing enclosing the tomb, there is in the middle a broad slab of marble, clothed with fixed silver metal. The surface of this slab opens with a double mouth, providing openings below for nard poured in, which the spirit, coming from the seat where the holy ash is laid, sanctifies, healing with a secret breath. These little vessels, which had drunk the liquids poured in as usual, suddenly, as earth rose up from the tomb, and those who had put nard in the place, preparing to draw it out to carry away for themselves, find, with wondrous novelty, instead of nard, the little vessels filled with a heap of bursting sand, and, frightened, draw back their hands with much dust from the jaws of the tomb. The new thing moves all and kindles zeal to inquire into the cause of the sudden portent. So it is agreed to fix a day and, the marble removed, to search the inner seat. For this, I confess, a too anxious care feared: whether perhaps the dust held something of the godly body, which the hand had drawn up, ready, out of the tomb through the open holes, and was carrying, clotted with various dirt, mixed with little bones together with sherds and rubble. Hence men's fears, in talk among themselves, supposed that perhaps some little animal, shut in hidden holes, was spitting out the sacred ash of the holy flesh from deeper down, as wild monsters in deserted fields are wont to dig the earth within with sharp snouts and pour out black heaps around their pits, so also from the inner hiding place of holy Felix. What made this more wondrous was that the marvellous eruption of heaped earth came at intervals of days.

So on the agreed day the work, useful in many respects, is taken up. The bishop sends all the presbyters to us. While they watch, the craftsman's hand sets to doing the priests' orders; and their first labour was to remove the railings from the place, and with following care to lift the clinging slabs, their nails loosened. But when we saw the chest set down under the covering of marble remaining with the joining of the throne unbroken, then secure faith drove the danger of error from the doubtful heart, since it proved by touch and eye that, the throne unharmed and the tomb nowhere cracked, the body of the veteran martyr, walled round on every side with strong defence, had lain open to no sacrilege, and that his godly bones kept the worthy honour of his flesh, bones to which holy spirits never cease to be present, whence a living grace abides at godly tombs, which proves that the bodies of those who died in Christ, buried without death, sleep for a time in calm sleep. So, the honour of Felix's tomb restored, we leave everything carefully secured, so that now, until the day of the Lord, when the due glory will shine on the saints raised together under Christ as leader, the bones may rest undisturbed in their bed, and the same peace that awaits the holy soul in the region above may keep the venerable body on earth. What remains for me still to tell? As if indeed I had worthily set forth what I have sung, or had told all the gifts of my lavish patron in full speech. Many lie hidden in their number, yet all of them sit fixed in our remembering breast, and very many have already been recalled, and more still remain to be recalled. But the rule of governing a book warns that the greatest must be picked out from the many.

When all the works had been built that are seen to stand by art in various ways, lofty through the halls, and surrounded far and wide through the forecourts by extended porticoes, all the buildings together seemed to beg only for the gift of water for their sorrowful inhabitants. I myself even, I confess, used now with complaining voice to accuse my Felix, as if he were pressing on sluggishly with these prayers, because he allowed the sharing of water to be denied us so long by the allied city. But he was drawing out delays for those hurrying with unconsidered mind, by a better counsel, linking them to fitting times; for thus the order of the works rightly required that the completion of these undertakings come first, which diligent care was preparing with many-sided effort around the holy halls of the venerable martyr; and when divine grace had put the finishing hand to the works, then, the vows ended in full order, it would channel the fountains, led into the built courts. In short, as soon as all the work here stood in finished preparation, the dry thirst of our vow was not drawn out long, and soon, God willing, the people's hearts, harsh before, gave easy consent with ready heart. I shall tell, then, the gift of water. Grant me now, Felix, by entreating the Lord, that speech may run for me in words with as easy eloquence as the fountains you have granted to stream with abundant flow into your forecourts and houses. All the things which the kindly Lord, through your intercession, has given us, he has adorned and increased with such a gift, by which he brought fountains to the thirsty fields.

That rock, Christ, flowed again for the godly from his breast, bringing back the gift of ancient kindness, so that he might moisten with unaccustomed water all the sand that was dry before, and make the waterless land stream with sudden floods, and that into the holy halls of his Felix, for the guest peoples gathered from various nations, through wells and pools and capacious basins alike, new drinks might run from streams poured abundantly. Who would grant me, highest fountain, that you water my deserts, and break through the pumice rock of my heart, and that I found my house on the rock and drink from you the water that would produce in my dry breast a living vein of water springing up eternally? But even this drop of slender eloquence, with which I speak of you, is surely drawn from there, whence also the source overflows into rivers. For who could speak of you even slightly without you, Christ, highest power of the highest Father? Your Spirit himself inspires you to be spoken of, the light in which we see the light of Father and Son as equal, so that, with the Holy One as guide breathing on us, we may confess Christ as God with the Father. But since, while I bear the name of the living fountain in my mouth, a drop has dripped into my mouth from the river of the Word, perhaps my lips will bring some taste from here, and now my tongue, not parched with dry throat, but as if more richly moistened, will speak of the gift of water. Among all the works built, which are seen to be many, this place requires me to set the name of devoted Abella into my little verses; for she seems worthy of the honour of this name, so that she too may be praised in the praise of Felix, because for Felix's honour she took on herself of her own accord a labour, sweating at which in the heat among sheer rocks she thought rest and reward.

Small in walls, but this town will be reported great for this holy work. Six miles from our Nola it lies among high-ridged mountains, from which it draws close at hand the waters that rise there and receives them into one basin, whence, through inserted pipes, it claims for itself the first of the flow and with the rest of the stream flows to the city of Nola, watering many estates here and there in the fields as well. But let me return to the thanks owed for the work as a gift; for she gave labour abundantly and freely for calling back the aqueduct, which long age had broken, to its vessels and channels again. The place, set among high rocks, with no path of roads, would not admit even pack animals, so that the heights of the immense mountain made it hard to find labour ready even for pay; hence a greater honour of reward enriches Abella, because, readily serving the sacred honour of Felix, with lavish piety she spent unpaid hands. One could see eager throngs from the whole people, council and populace driven together with one mind, roused at new morning, running gladly to the work, and eager, vying with one another, carried to the highest peaks, and, with necks bowed under the heavy load of a basket and with rubble carried along over the bushy heights, repeating frequent returns under the burning sun, and stretching the whole day, as long as the long day lingers in summer, from dawn to the late hours of evening, and, wakeful, their bodies barely refreshed by a short night, rising again before day to their workmen's tools, and, God quickening them, not feeling the labour.

In short, the grace of the great work went forward so that, as if in play, in a few days the whole work reached its end, completed with the task perfected, and the channel, from the distant mountains, in a packed column, where before it had been interrupted by long decay, receiving little springs from different rocks on every side, called back the gathered water to cities once thirsty, and, overflowing along the full course of the channels for many miles of road and through the buildings of our Felix, filled a new basin, with the Summus overflowing. And what gave proof of the divine gift: the water ran here more abundantly in the summer months than it used to flow before from winter rains. Here, my Nola, I will now rightly set you as defendant before our common patron, and, keeping a calm mind amid the anger of gentle piety, I will play the part of a roused patron, rebuking his little daughter in the words of the old complaint. For when I sought, Nola, a just share in your spring, why, troubled by fear, did you harshly refuse the hospitality of shared water? Forgetting to respect divine rights, you thought my wishes were for human uses, and, forgetting Felix, you believed you would be giving to me, and you groaned sadly that, if you granted it, your homeland would soon be dry, its drink taken away, and you often shouted this in a stirred-up uproar, not knowing that fountains would be ready through divine resources, as you also experienced. For soon God the Creator himself rebuked minds sluggish to trust Christ, when, after the peace agreed, you held the use of the stream dutifully divided with Felix as partner, so as to rebuke your complaint the more with surpassing goodness. He did not, as you feared, make you thirst by dividing the water, but, as author and nourisher of things and of men together, who founded all things by his word, he showed you that the thing was his which you, distrusting the Lord of things, denied to his friend as if it were your own;

you certainly saw, for the fact itself compelled you to confess, the sublime rights of the eternal Father and the mighty merit of Felix, when the water flowed abundantly in the heat, and by the godly loss by which you had given part to the martyr's halls, sudden courses grew, and, as the abundance of the spring was loosed at its mouth, the ordered streams, returned to you with much interest, flowed into your walls; and at the very time when so often you, the possessor of your water, used to be in want, God returning much more than he had taken from you, water flowed abundantly for your drinking and your baths. What gift, then, shall I return to you for so great a gift, Abella, poor in wealth? At least, while I proclaim your service and name, marking them in our song, I shall repay you this price in the honour of reward: that you may always be written as added to the praises of holy Felix and be remembered as the nursling of so great a patron, of whose gifts the greatest portion has been made for you. Now this labour of yours, to which the spirit of Felix drove you, that, with your whole people and council in harmony, you undertook a work to be achieved with great sweat, with the summer season doubling the hard labour, so that the channel of the ancient structure across unfavourable heights, known to past ages but now without use since the water failed, lying hidden among vast ridges under great piles of woods heaped up on every side, you strip of thick mounds, and restore its long-forgotten service, and gather the veins scattered through pathless places, which were sucked deep into the pumice sands, and compel each water again to follow its own tracks, and bring it back into the mouth of the mother channel, and make the long-empty channels, their course having ceased, overflow with returning flood, and now, Summus, you flood Nola with water, long complaining with its springs taken away, which enjoys Felix's waters, because this abundance is not the city's own now, which it has lately obtained by the zeal of Felix, enriched with abundant streams from divine help in return for the gift of a modest drop.

So you too, Nola, cherish little Abella with me as a mother, since, as you know, though she is your daughter, she is yet the mother of your waters, from whose native mountains all abundance will flow to you, in which you had been proud before among the fortunate, and of which afterwards, with better zeal, you were the minister. Rejoice, then, my Nola, and congratulate yourself, exulting with all your strength in Christ, who fashioned you through his friend and beloved Felix; and his lofty hand increased your beauty, with nature serving. Look at your face, in which you now shine out new, so that you may know whether you gave something to Felix's honour, or are rather cultivated, enriched by God through Felix. Where the rough pebble was dry in bare fields, now grace, changed, grows green in watered clods. Not only these fountains, Nola, has the rich grace of Christ poured out for you by the merit of Felix; it has also led heaven-flowing fountains here to your walls, and, placed in the rejoicing bosom of Felix, bade them flow out from your city into many cities with streams poured out. I speak of those servants of Christ, a pair illustrious to God, a pair noble in the name of Christ, lately risen within your borders with their mother Albina, pledges of all the saints and joys of heaven, Pinianus with Melania, a pair blessed in their covenant. God has made them both children of Felix and breasts, breasts of divine goodness flowing with milk, from which every poor man takes flowing nourishment, and every rich man likewise takes wholesome teaching. These, see, are fountains from the godly river of Christ, which do not stream through the earth in a visible flood, but abound in the living water of merciful kindness. Grant, Christ, that these fountains may well up for you with everlasting abundance in the breast of your Felix, and that these veins may never be thinned by any star. Flow always into hearts dedicated to you, Christ, and grant to your Felix, to whom you have entrusted us sinners, that your kindness may never withdraw the fountain of this help from our inmost being, and that Felix himself, an abundant fountain from your fountain, may flood us, so that your fountain, Christ the King, may always spring up in us, and that Felix may obtain that we, from wretched and needy, may by the lot of his name live happy.

Already I promise myself to store your songs in sacred books, and that you, inflamed by the divinity of Christ God, will loose your eloquent mouth to the highest Father. Only begin to give your breast to divine things and to lift your senses, raised up to God, from the earth. Soon a new light will rise for your eyes as heaven opens, and the sacred Spirit will enter by a silent passage through hidden ways and shake your inmost being with glad breath. Come, then, stretch the lyre, strike your fruitful breast, telling of great things; let the skill spent on your usual songs depart; a greater order of things is born for you. Not now do you sing the judgment of Paris or the false wars of the giants. That play of yours may have been for a boyish age once; trifles befitted the small boy. Now, graver in mind as you are more advanced in years, spurn the light Camenae with mature heart, and, as an age now fitted to chaste ways and the venerable appearance of your face require, take up the material, conceive divine thoughts. If you have won any glory from falsehoods and a great name from empty things, when you sang fictions in ancient songs or told earthly deeds, praising the insignia of triumphing kings, you were not worthy to take praise from those whom you rather adorned with the gift of rich speech. How much greater glory will come to you from these undertakings, in which, exercising your tongue, you will also train your mind to holiness and grasp praise and life together? And while, skilful, you read and write the true miracles of the highest God, you will learn to be nearer and dearer to God himself, whom, while believing you marvel at him, you will begin to love, and by loving God you will be loved in return by Christ.

Hitherto that trumpet of your voice has sounded for vain uses; now let it thunder more loftily the divine acts. You are stirred to know the causes of things and the beginnings of the world: lest, wandering, with your mind spread out into the void, you vainly seek innumerable worlds, the dreams of Epicurus, which, mad, he brings forth through the void from atoms as parents, the lawgiver Moses, venerable by his ancient name, telling of the world composed from its first origin by God's establishing, will release you from empty cares, and, telling of man formed from clay and breathed into with the sacred breath, he himself will teach you by whose gift you are higher than all that breathe on earth. Nor should you despise yourself as the stones of Pyrrha or the clay of Prometheus, you whom the highest hand deigned to fashion lofty in face and soul and in his own image. You will learn likewise, lest you go on handing over our free will to the fates, what sentence bound us to death and under whose law we drag out life. If you cast your mind higher than heaven and above the stars, and desire to know what is, or what was before time, John teaches what lies beyond both the world and the ages. “In the beginning,” he says, “was the Word”; God rejoiced in the Word as his pledge, and the Word was of God and at the same time the same Word was God. This is the Word without which nothing was made, through which all things were made and flourish, which rules all things, to which all things, subjected, obey, and all nature, laid low in eternal service to the begotten God, adores the name of the Begetter. And every tongue through the nations now confesses that Jesus is Lord, reigning in the Father's majesty, by whose name our salvation stands founded and our faith rests, reaching toward the ages of eternal life.

Supported by his divine gift, we mortals manage to overcome our fragile nature by chaste deeds and to break the chains of rigid death, and in the body not to follow bodily laws, following the divine footsteps of Christ God, with the mind governing soul and body under sacred arms, since the mind subjected to God takes up the arms of salvation and obtains a kingdom over its own soul and flesh; and each man becomes rightly master of himself, who, given to the one Lord for ever, is made ruler over his own limbs, unconquered by vices and a hater of wickedness, stronger than adversities by virtues, in just order a true man, because, mighty in mind, in which he has the light of reason, he tempers the servant senses with no struggle and bends his breast with calm reins. You, whose noble mind burns with the fire of heavenly seed, climb in spirit into the heavenly recesses and lay your head in the bosom of the Lord; soon, as you gape for it, Christ will generously give breasts flowing with sacred milk and will flood your mind with divine light, so that, the fog driven off, you may see the great laws of the dread God, by which Christ, the all-begetting Wisdom, abiding in himself, always renews all things. And as he wills, God, himself the judge of his works, holds and changes forms and lengthens or shortens the times of life, ruling heaven, sea, stars, winds by the power by which he made them (the great exodus from Egypt teaches it, and the tyrant drowned in the returning sea, who had himself before experienced heavy upheavals through all the elements), he whom all things fear, whom all things serve. For at one time a common land held the Jews, then the only nation chosen by God;

and yet that heavy anger of God against the proud enemies ran distinct among the mingled peoples. Now I know you do not say that uncertain chance drives the sea with storms, when you read that the sea, bidden to part, parted, and a dry way lay open between the waters with the waves stiffened, and again the loosened sea, at the command and rod of the holy prophet, returned into its liquid bays. In both the power of the sea obeyed, so that a way was given to the saints and vengeance. What of the prophet fleeing to Tarshish, whom, thrown into the sea by the lot of danger, a beast caught with its wide jaws and belched out unharmed from its vast belly? Does he not teach that sea and stars are moved by God's command? For, fleeing God in vain, whom, as he holds all things, no one escapes, he stirred the wrath of sky and sea together. For nature, knowing him a rebel against the almighty Lord, feared, as if aware, to carry the guilty man safely by itself, and bound the fugitive with winds and waves. This prophet was chosen by God to terrify sinful peoples with threatening warning; after he spoke of heavy destruction and broke the guilty and turned away the wrath of divinity, Nineveh washed its crimes with lavish weeping, and, well turned, escaped its last day. Did that king have a fate, who, with death near, prayed to the Lord, who he knew alone could bend his own laws, to stretch his spent age further, and earned to draw out three lustra, outliving his own years, and to live ages not his own? Shall we now admire Plato weaving three fates, or the numbers of Aratus, or the painted stars of Manetho?

Let them say, I ask, where they then placed the swift hours for those being born, and which stars went with which signs, when godly Hezekiah, praying by the power of faith, turned the courses of the stars and disturbed the passages of heaven by his commands, the light of the sun driven back? Or when the same sun, at the command of a holy leader, held back the day, night delayed, so that the victory of the sacred people might be completed: the balance of the sky stood still, the world's turning checked, so that the increased light might take in great triumphs. What of Christ, the offspring and power and wisdom of God, does he not sufficiently remove our cares from vain errors? And he teaches us both by warnings and by deeds that one God rules all things, so that we should think nothing to be without the mind of God the ruler, saying that not a leaf falls from the tree, nor a bird from the air, without his command? And when the Almighty calms the sea by his word or treads it with his foot, and drives away diseases by his word or presses demons, or sends souls back into dead bodies, and bids those long lifeless come out of opened tombs, and restores the rotten buried as life returns, does he not sufficiently show his own power as the author who alone governs all nature and life? To these, I pray, to these rather vow your study and labour of reading and writing; sing the great undertakings of the Thunderer, write the beginnings of things created by the Word, and the chaos before day and the twilight of the first light, and whatever, through all the elements in various ages since, you will learn was said or done by God through the holy volumes, which Moses taught, set on the tablets of the law, or which the new law of the gospel testament marks, revealing the mysteries of Christ, hidden before. Then I shall truly call you a divine poet, and shall drink your songs like a draught of sweet water, when they offer me nectar-draughts from the highest fountains, singing back Christ the Lord of things and testifying that your mind is strong with God, so that I may take from you at once riches of mouth and mind, and may congratulate the kinsman whom I rejoice to have joined to me by covenant, and near to me under holy religion, and, with bonds not to be dissolved with the mortal body, may embrace you as a holy brother with an everlasting pledge. Read happily, Jovius, in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Spring opens voices for the birds; my tongue has its spring in the birthday of Felix, by whose light winter itself flowers for rejoicing peoples; and though with black cold the season still draws out its wintry quarters amid frosts, the year congealed on whitening lands, yet on this day godly joys make a glad spring for us. Grief, the winter of the mind, yields, its cares driven from the breast; the clouds of sadness flee from the serene heart. As the gentle swallow recognizes friendly days, and the white bird with black wings, and that turtledove, kin of the godly dove, and the thickets resound with goldfinches only in new spring, and the birds which only lately wandered mute under bristling hedges soon rejoice everywhere as spring returns, as varied in their tongues as in their many-coloured wings: so I too recognize this day, which holy festivals renew every year with the just honour of great Felix. Now a calm spring is reborn for me as the year rejoices; now it delights to loose my mouth in measures and songs in vows, and to flower with new voices. God, flow into my heart, Christ, and fill me, thirsty, from heavenly fountains. But even a drop from you, sprinkled on my marrow, will be a river. For what wonder is it if with a little dew you fill the smallest soul, you who, made man in a small body, filled the world with eternal seed and saved the whole world with a drop of blood? Nod assent, fountain of the Word, God the Word, and make me now melodious with sweet voice like that bird of spring which, hiding under green foliage, rare in pathless places, is wont to soothe with many kinds of measures and through one tongue pour out more than one voice in changing song, a bird of one colour in plumage, but painted in its songs.

Now it rolls smooth measures, now draws out sharp whistles in long sounds, again begins as it were a tearful song, and suddenly cutting off its complaint with an end deceives astonished ears with the melody broken. But let your grace flow on me continually from you, Christ. And yet I pray that, like that bird, it may be granted me to vary my measures and to bring forth every year the promised songs with changed speech, though from one mouth, because rich grace always adds different material through the Lord's wondrous powers, which God, Christ, multiplies in dear Felix, producing famous miracles with saving signs. We see those which are wont to be seen every day, when he presses the viper's brood, the savage demons, and lashes the shouting enemies with a hidden hand; but this itself is noted as a wonder in this power: that although throughout the whole year he harasses the tormented demons and bids them leave the limbs of men, yet he prolongs many cases, so that a longer punishment may harass the evil enemies, or so that those who deserved to become vessels for evils, the healing delayed on account of their desert, may pay more fully for every crime over a prolonged time; or whether he is eager to indulge his birthday in this, to give help to few at other times, so that, kind, he may give more gifts on his birthday. For when this day draws near as the year slips away, then he presses more often and more heavily. You might see sick swarms then gathered more densely and sure health sought near the festival.

Then the demons, kindled more heavily than usual, burn and howl more mournfully and, subdued by greater force, groan now at their final torments, nor are they allowed to depart by an easy exit, but first, driven by wondrous and various painful punishments, they are lifted on high, suspended higher than usual, and are shaken in the void of the air and cling by hidden bonds in penal delay through the void; though it is through bodies not their own, their own punishment wears out the harassed enemies. The souls are released from punishments while they seem to bear punishments in the body, and, immune, they behold torments not their own in their own limbs; the man, with the demon captured, is free; there is only an appearance of punishments in the body; sensation is absent, because the cross is not the man's but the demon's. Bitter enemy, why do you insult us? With what hope do you rush at us? See, wicked one, by the art of our Redeemer in turn you, the mocker, are mocked; your trick turns into your own chains for you; capturing, you are captured, and binding, you are bound. The ensnared man becomes the snare, and the robber's own booty deceives him; and while the captive seeks the unlawful food of the captured body, he devours a deadly hook. I shall tell things greater still than these, yet seen: before others that man, whose sick limbs a long-established enemy besieges, snatched, shaken out from the crowd, to the godly threshold of the sacred martyr, and, brought up to the consecrated railings before the saint's doors, with body turned over, suspended with feet upturned, looking at the roof; and, what is more wondrous and sacred, his clothes do not fall back over his face, but, as if stiff or sewn to his feet, every sacred part of the body is veiled with a chaste covering, so that, evidently, the reverence of the divine work may remain with bodies covered, nor may the demon exult in the very punishment by which he is tormented by exposing shame with naked limbs; he is tortured more heavily with decency unharmed, while the coverings sit straight though the limbs are inverted.

These things are wonderful and great (who denies it?), and yet, better known by familiarity, they seem less wonderful to hear, however reverend to see and great in deed. So hear, I pray, the small and new deeds of my patron, which the Lord Christ does in him with many-sided power, by all of which he is eager to confirm one faith in us: that through open proofs we may see that the hidden God is present, and that the heavenly Lord, by the Word by which he founded all things, cares with fatherly zeal for the affairs and minds of men. Let my brother Theridius give me the first beginnings of the telling; for what work of Felix shall I take up to be sung sooner or first, than the one he did for me under my own roofs, of which he is also the master? The year falls on this day from that very night. You know that custom by which we are wont to fast before the day, and, the sacred rites offered late in the evening, each returns to his own home. Then, therefore, when the assemblies were dismissed from the Lord's temple, after rest was given to weary bodies by taking food, we began to exult in hymns to God and to prolong the night with psalms. Meanwhile this brother of mine, leaving the friendly choir to drive off, in the breeze breathing outside, the heat which the cell, smoky with waxed papyrus wicks, gave, where the portico stretches in a row of narrow roof, though the path lay hidden, blind with no light at night, yet here, with fearless step through familiar thresholds, alas, he was going, unwary of the danger now near. Close by, in the middle of the roof, between the ceiling and the ground, the rope that usually suspends a lamp was swinging, tying to its top thread a three-pronged iron, into which the handle of a glass lamp is inserted, and the eared cup is fixed by three hooks on every side.

At the bottom it is white with water, above the water yellow with oil. Liquid stands on liquid; the slippery moisture swims on the fountain below, and the mixture of fluids does not come together though joined. And it is wondrous that the fat floats; nor does the dense matter break through the loose element, but the light supports the thick, so that the water, thinner than the solid flow, staying beneath the oil, is the foundation for liquids. And so great a discord shines within among the mixed juices that you may see the liquids mixed yet apart, and in the common bosom of the cup, with clear distinction, the nature of each liquid keeps its colour. A three-footed lead is sunk in the middle, and its hollow tip stands out, packed with the kindling of oiled flax. The wet tow catches liquid fire in a slender flame, and the slender wick flashes in the glass shallows, surrounded by the space of the standing oil, and quivering from its trembling tip a sharp light softly casts shadowy light into the inner rooms and opens the dense darkness with calm splendour. This, however, had been removed when the night was already far spent, since, the hours being prolonged by the wakeful boys, the thirsty light had failed with its oil consumed. But the boy who had taken away the lamp when the light went out, and had loosened the rope in taking it down, neglected to draw it up and tie it back with the usual knot. Hence the line, looser, swung low, without the welcome light and full of blind danger. For the top of the noose was armed with toothed, threatening hooks, and these then met my brother badly, almost badly, or rather well by Christ's nod, who turned well into memorable joys an event deadly for us.

So (see the hand of Christ) that rope, wrongly hanging through the darkness lower than usual, hung below its accustomed space in the air; and thence, made level with the region of his head, as his height was, alas, with its triple point it caught the face of the unsuspecting man as he came and put a hook into his eye as it met him, and the point, slipping through to the inmost, leaped under the tender eyelid, where the cautious hand of the healing art can scarcely guide a light probe with trembling control and draw it under the eyelid with a light touch. Struck suddenly by the blow of so hard a stroke, he cries out and, disturbed, brings his trembling hands to the eye itself; and he holds the iron shut in together with the eye, to restrain it, or, if it should fall, to catch the slipping little ball, which, keeping the inmost parts of sight, lies white within a round bag with liquid poured between, under the glassy image of the black pupil. This, like a root, supports the eye with marrow beneath and feeds it with the moist fuel of the veins, while the fountains of the eyes stand firm in an equal star. But if, by heavy disease or blow, alas, the membrane of the flowing little eye is torn and bursts, that ball leaps out and, left by the nourishing juice, deserts the drying hollow emptied of light. Meanwhile the boy, roused by the cry of the sufferer, runs up, leaving his bed as sleep flees, and holds a lit lamp with his hand to his face.

He had covered his face with his hands and, with his forehead turned upward, like one transfixed, was looking up, to keep the rope unmoving, his body balanced, governing his trembling limbs by the requirements of the wound, while he feared to tear the wound open by a contrary movement, and with the one eye that was still free he guarded the captured eye from danger by its companion's help, and yet did not dare to touch the iron to draw it out, lest by drawing the point he should draw out the clinging ball as well, nor could he any longer bear the delay of the weapon fixed beneath his sight. But, as he despaired of healing from mortal help, soon Felix, implored, is present with divine help; hanging in so great a wound, he calls on him and brings out his complaint in such words: “Woe is me! How great are the sins that press my labours, who have deserved, wretch, to receive so great a blow with Felix as patron, and near Felix too, and moreover on his very birthday? Alas, guilty of great crime, whom punishment strikes at the time when he is wont to release. Holy one, I pray, help your own; I know you stand nearest, and from the adjoining building, with your ears turned here, you have heard, Felix, the weeping of your unhappy nursling; or if you cling now, joined to the lofty side, before the throne of the great King as a friendly confessor, you receive this voice of your poor man, revered one, across the clouds with the ear of God, and do not scorn it, but there you ask for the health that you may bring me, Christ pitying. So come, Felix, everlasting patron of my soul, now run to me as physician in bodily danger. Run, I pray, and set your holy hands against the fall threatening my eye, and pull out the fixed iron you see, which I do not dare to draw out with my own hand, lest I rob myself of sight while I try to free myself from the weapon.

For so I feel the bolt driven deep into me, the nail inserted under the covered inner parts of the eye. Only you, divine hand, which made the very eyes in us, the right hand which made you too mighty with healing power, by which you tame the black demons by tormenting them, by which you can drive out every torment of the perishing body by the lofty name of Christ, mighty through the almighty Lord: with him as protector, now take me up to be healed. And let not my sins conquer you, but rather let them fall, conquered by you. For I am worthier of this wound, I confess, than of the gift of gentle Christ. But remember the word and deed of the Lord himself, who by his coming redeemed the life of the sinner. If you wish to judge with me by the right of justice, I am worthy to be punished not in one eye only but in both, so that I might be such in face as I am also within, in my dark heart, by which I make ill use of my bodily sight, blind to just things, sharp-eyed for wicked ones, and I confess that the sinner ought to be one-eyed, if it is fitting that such a man be yours. Bound by whatever crime, he becomes worthy of pardon if he now begins to be yours, as I long ago began to be part of your own, to whom I came, not following love of my native land, but with the desire by which I had dedicated myself to you, holy one, despising the dangers of sea and land; and, by the example of the good, I broke the bonds of my kindred land to serve you, together with those companions among whom I boast myself yours; show it in this help, that I may not lose my sight, pierced with so great a wound.

Grant, I pray, so noble a gift to your unworthy servant for the praise of the Lord; grant this distinction to your day, holy one, so that, as the glory of Christ, whom you confessed, made this day your birthday of eternal light for ages, I may have it as the birthday of my eye, and may likewise celebrate Felix and the light received for me from Felix.” While the simple man weeps such things, behold, the prospering hand of blessed Felix is soon present, and, silently breathing on the wavering mind of the frightened man, strengthens mind and hand, so that he does not fear to draw out the iron, about to dare in safety. Scarcely had he tried this, and the hook, as if slippery, falls out of the eye without the eye; only a stream followed and spewed out with tears the heat that had festered. Soon the eye, cleansed from the night of so great a danger, shone with as pure a mirror as it is seen now too, sound, shining by the gift of eternal Christ. And I think it shines more today than usual, because the very day that restored the light adds light too. So, faithful ones, behold now in your minds the image of so great a danger, and likewise weigh the working of so great a gift. A man already grave with mature age and tall in body had stuck on the little hook of the line like a fish on a hook; and he hung in the place of the lamp, with his eye open, but not willingly, for the nail, hooking under the eyelid it was fixed in, drew it apart; nor did it make a wound, the divine hand forbidding, which had made there both the point of the iron harmless and its weight light; where heavy mucus or a hair is intolerable, and where we cannot bear the speck of the smallest grain of sand, who would believe that there the heavy iron with curved point, smeared moreover with dirt clotted from the lamp, fixed there, pressed long on the delicate pupil with its metal with impunity, and the sight was violated by no wound?

What hand so fine in its fingers or in the art of healing could insert itself into so slight a gap between joined parts, and, penetrating between the eyelid and the eye, pushed under along both ways by a fragile passage, suspend the iron with the eye unharmed, iron which filled the whole orb of the eye with the thickness of its solid covering, fixing it with its point yet not hurting it with a wound? What hand could do this but the hand that made all things? That Spirit of God, penetrating everywhere through all natures of things, finer than everything fine, who restored lost light to the blinded and who made one blind from the womb to have new light, filling out the face of an imperfect body's nature with the Creator's art, by which he perfects the whole world, that Son of God, the hand and wisdom of the Father, the all-producing fountain and stability of things, Christ. He himself once fashioned that man in his mother's womb not complete, so that afterward, made man and himself creator, he might add this wondrous work too to his divine signs, filling the empty orbs with sight. In short, spitting on the ground he makes clay, from which he gives back to his believing nursling the sight denied him at birth, and with the same material with which he had fashioned the whole body he completes the half-finished man in the defective part, to prove that he himself had come in our flesh, he who, with God the Father, by the word of a common image, had formed Adam, composed of clay and breath. He himself, the maker, our light, God, willed to adorn the birthday of his friend Felix with so great a healing, to show the lofty merit of the confessor by a mighty gift, not to heap up the honour of the martyr by this work, on whom he had long ago conferred great palms with noble titles and blessed name, which the kindness of Christ the Lord continues in him at all times with untiring powers.

But God willed to give us a special joy at this time, and, working some such sign of our own patron for his own servants, to show us as the very nurslings of starry Felix, and to teach us to live by his merit and care, by which, guarding our salvation as watchman, he often keeps the hostile enemy with his night attacks away from our limbs and minds alike. In short, we now rejoice in the honour of our danger, and, seeing shining with equal sight him whom we had seen almost disfigured with one eye lost, we rejoice, touched in our marrow, that this brother is safe, whom Christ has given us with so great a gift. Rightly I value him equal to my eyes, in whose light the hand of Felix shines in Christ, my glory. O happy fall, good wounds, sweet danger, through which I learned that I am the care of the martyr! For it was worth so much to me almost to have lost light, that I now have light by Felix's gift.

Martinianus, brother to me in spirit and kinsman by one faith, whom you, escorting him with eloquent letters, had sent to come to us, now barely in possession of his own safety, empty of the writings he lost, but full, as the herald of your love, we have received as your very mouth, and a letter truer than letters, sealed from your heart, since he brought you back to us in a spiritual letter, we have read with mind and ear. Now, both bound to each other, we give right hands in the kiss of sacred peace, and we offer to God the sacrifice of praise and return thanks to Christ, by whose deliverance our guest entered our thresholds safe out of the sea; for he suffered dire things, and yet experienced miracles in his dangers. Setting out from his homeland, for a reason known to you, he had chosen the journey on foot, but, reckoning with himself the long stretches of land, he changed his mind about the road, and preferred the idle nausea of tossing on the waves to the labour of the feet. He set sail from Narbo along the savage road of the sea, trusting a fragile hull. Hence this man, lazy in walking, in turn became repentant of sailing.

For when, setting out from the coasts of the mainland, he advanced into the deep straits, now in dense night, but bright with a serene sky, the sea smiling with calm, when the stars alone ordered the course, the moon being then absent from the sky, suddenly the ship, rotten with long time, fails in its service of carrying, and, its sides' joints loosened, comes apart and takes in the waves through its cracks. The calm had persuaded all to sleep; only the helmsman, wakeful, secure as the vessel glided on smooth waters, was cutting his foamy way and with whistling calling up stronger breezes to carry the course forward. Meanwhile the ship sank lower, as its filling grew, and, the planks gaping wider, a larger wave ran in; and for those who had no waves from the open sea, a wave is born in the ship and, now washing beneath the limbs of the sleepers, wakes them with wet chill. As one felt it, then another, dread shakes off sleep from all. They fear with terror of death and still do not know the causes of their fear. By what way can the wretched flee the hostile sea? They are sinking in their own ship. If the seas boiled, stirred by winds, safety would be kept in the ship;

with the sea poured within the bowels of the hull, in what place will life be found? What harbour have they, for whom the sea is inside the ship, killing them, overwhelmed within? But God stretches out his fatherly hand to all, even to harbour and salvation, and between the high backs of the mid-flood spreads the bosom of kindness, by which he catches those falling into the abyss of death and sets them in the shallows of life. He had prepared for this help a skiff following the four-banked craft, so that those whom God had chosen to save from that crowd of sailors it might take up, swimming close beside the ship gaping in the sea. The master of the ship himself, when he first set loose from the shore into the deep, that Novatianist, carrying a split faith in his shipwrecked heart, a man of death, and so thinking things fit for death, as was his habit, did not want this skiff to be part of the load. Now he hastens at once to climb into this boat of his, and when he was pressed by the final danger, he strove to push it off, so that, the rope by which it was attached to the ship broken, it might be let go on the sea. But, overcome by the voices of many opposing him from both sides, he stayed, frustrated, because the opinion of all prevailed, stronger with Christ as its author, so that soon the boat might be a saving refuge, surviving the overwhelmed stern.

Unusual was the appearance of the shipwreck: death for the sailors, peace for the sea. Outside, calm was silent on the strait; in the ship there was a storm. No rocks, no gale had broken the vessel; but old age, stronger than these, had loosened the firm timbers, fixed with iron nails, with age wearing them away. The sky shone with serene clouds, the sea gleamed with stars. But what good did the glad quiet of winds and sea together offer those whom the carriage of a broken ship was deserting in the depth of the sea? The wave drinks the ship, the ship drinks up the wave; the waters are swallowed and swallow. The sailors, drunk with a draught of salt, are killed by a sad drunkenness. The gentle wave smiled on other ships, and raged against one ship alone. But in the danger of very many one may see the working of heavenly judgment. The common danger of death awaits all whom one ship carries; and behold, they are divided by various fortunes, given over to death and to life. And lest this perhaps be thought allotted indiscriminately to good and bad alike, it is established that no Christian perished, and that the faithless died. For either a Jew of malicious heart perished, or one guilty of proud schism.

Whomever right faith in Christ had marked, him life recognized as its own. Yet there were added to the Christians some not yet consecrated by this name, whom flight, joined with theirs, saved from the deep, because they had clung to the Christians. For with the faithless crowd of sailors no faithful man was drowned, so that God showed in a few the clear truth of a great mystery: that at the end of the world, when the nations are to be divided, there will be a distinction among all, when the avenging angel will pass over those marked beforehand on the face with the standard of the cross. So in that ship no one was handed over to death who was endowed with the truth. The impious joined to Christians lived, as light conquered night. For death had no power to add Christians to the dead, because the sign shines on the forehead of Christians, by which death, subdued, collapsed. The captain himself, head of the lost ship, was first among those who perished. For before he perished shipwrecked in the sea, he had already made shipwreck in mind; twice drowned was he: the hull drowned him in the waves, his error in hell. He could have broken himself away from the danger, but his captive mind, in the fitting chains of avarice, bound fast his head, owed to death, tying it to the end.

For, lest he outlive the ship and the cargo, he preferred death to safety. Martinianus, already at the last thread, mingled among the men going under, the sound of the tumultuous crowd rouses and wakes from the sleep of death. He was then, weary, in a remote nook of the prow, and secure in his innocence, like Jonah once hidden in the belly of the ship, breathing heavily in sleep. But, roused by the mournful cries of the perishing on all sides, and all his limbs shaken by the feet of the crowd, he leaps from his hard bed. With most drowned within, in the belly of the ship, along the edges of the sides, where sailors are wont to run, ready, to raise the sails or prop them with poles, the ship, covered by the flood, was still floating by its outermost planks; Martinianus joins those searching out the way of salvation by this way, and, Christ driving him, a fugitive from the mass of death, he becomes the companion of those escaping, and with a leap throws himself far into the boat, which was a harbour for very many. And he would almost have stayed, left to death, to be sunk in the sea with the vessel, had not Christ, as if seizing him with his own hand, snatched him from the lake of death.

As Joseph once fled the raging woman, his garment thrown back, so this man, everything left behind, naked, escaped the faithless ship by flight. And as once the beast, at command, received Jonah in its mouth as it met him and sent him, slippery, through its wide-gaping throat into its belly, swallowing his body unharmed, its teeth held back, and not eating the one it devoured: so the skiff, coming to meet him, received him headlong from the high ship into the waves, and carried him through the night in its faithful, safe bosom, until it brought him back to harbour. But since mention has been made of the great prophet, in whom the image of a godly mystery foreshowed death in a three-day burial with returning salvation, it pleases me, turning back the track of the song a little, to run back to Jonah. Wondrous devices of the Lord: sunk in the sea, he floats untouched by the waves. Devoured, he lives, and the one who swallowed him remains fasting while its food lives, and though he is its booty, he is not food for the beast, and he uses its belly as a house. O cloister worthy of God's holy fugitive! He is caught by the sea, by which he had fled, and, sent deep into the belly of the vast beast, is held in a living prison. Thrown from the ship, he perishes and sails on the waves, an exile from land, a guest of the sea;

he walks about in the cave of the beast's body, a captive and a free defendant. For, free from the waves, within the sea and outside the sea, he swims in the swimming beast, and though shut in his body, the prophet goes out to God, flying in spirit. His body is held by a body, but the flight of the mind earthly bonds do not hold. Shut in the belly, he breaks his prison by prayer and reaches God's ears; free for prayer and bound against flight, he convicts himself by his own faith. For he who had thought God could be escaped through the sea and that he could hide from God in a ship must now believe that, even within a beast sunk in the sea, the judge is present. Now I must bring back the foot of my pliant words to my own Jonah, whom the capacious boat received in the manner of the whale and, shut in its belly, carried, trembling with cold and fear, and returned safe to land. He tells a wonder: that during that time, when, leaping headlong from the high stern, he had fallen into that little boat and had come to that part of it where the boat had taken in much water through its cracks, with a stinking pool of bilge, at once, God warming his cold limbs, he was lulled by sacred rest, and, naked and wet, conditions which sleep usually flees, slept more softly than in a bed, and through the whole space of time in which he was brought back to shore he was given over to sleep, nor was he wakened by the water with which he was soaked, nor by the cold he had caught from his nakedness;

Although the season of the year was mild autumn, yet for the shipwrecked it was winter, whom the hard loss of their lost clothing and icy trembling were shaking. Hear another marvel, from which you may gather the faithful grace shown to Martinianus, beloved brother, and praise God and embrace our holy brother: as he felt the boat gliding into harbour with the sand of the shore grating, as sleep left him, he at last came to himself and recovered himself; he wakes and touches, lying against his breast, the epistles of the apostle. This book he had taken up in his fear, but unknowing, leaving all his things behind, or else that book, living by the Holy Spirit, had clung to him without his feeling it. Consider, I pray, who but Christ gave this protector to his minister? He testifies that it did not even occur to him at that time of danger to remember to take from there the little parchment wrapped up in his packs. And even if it had come into his mind in his fear, he would not have had time to look for it. But in the body of his letters Paul the teacher was present, and, loving his reader with pure heart, led him away from the hand of death; again God granted Paul men to be rescued from the bottom of the sea.

The power of grace which was once in the apostle himself when he sailed has now, by the support of his letters, for Martinianus and the others who then clung to the Christians in their flight, prepared a safe outcome from the danger, as it had distinguished the faithful from the impious among the shipwrecked. So when the two-oared boat, brought to the shore, put out the wet men, holding on to life and at the same time seeking it, they beg help for their survival, lest, given back to the land, more savage than the waves, they should perish of cold and hunger. But nearby, set on the soil of the Gauls, Massilia, daughter of the Greeks, a city, nursling of the holy church, opened its humane bosom. Seeking this city, the shipwrecked tell of their misfortune and ask to be fed and clothed. The brotherhood receives Martinianus and warms him with roof and food. But the poor, with copious love, lend a tiny alms. Generous affection makes up for the slight things given; they enrich their guest by praying, and send him off with their peace, rich with spiritual provision for the road. Yet he was given cheap boots, so that he would not wander with a sailor's bare foot, he who would rather have been kept warm unshod than be shod and cold.

But though he would have endured going by land after the sea, he refused out of shame at his nakedness, reckoning this too: lest he be thought to feign nakedness for love of gain, if, covered with a ragged garment, he should go through forts, villages, towns, like the greedy beggars who are wont to wander through sea and lands, who, swearing falsely that they are monks or shipwrecked, sell the name and the misfortune. But this Christian of ours, though he was truly shipwrecked, taking care not to be thought like deceivers, and refusing to deceive others himself, does not want to be a traveller, lest he acquire the new name of impostor for himself, and prefers to bear the tossing of life by sailing than the blushing of his face by walking. So, shabby in rags, shining in his shoes, he chooses to float again, and seeks the port again, and prefers the unsafety of the sea to the safety of the land road, so that, sheltered by the ship as far as the shores of his vow, like an unencumbered sailor in the company of sailors' nakedness, he might escape the shame of nakedness. God the King, favouring faithful constancy, attends his bold faith, and, changing turns, makes up for hard adversities with prosperities that follow, and prepares a ship planked with solid timber to carry him across;

he commands peace to the storms, puts clouds to flight, and directs the course in the breeze, tempering sky and sea with such quiet that the course does not stall in calm, nor does dangerous speed press the ship with heavy blast. So this man, Christ gently soothing, having crossed the rough sea, glides into a harbour farther from the city, whose name is Centum Cellae, since from there the ship was to be brought on further to enter the harbour of the lighthouse. Scarcely believing he had reached the shore of the land he longed for, leaving the ship, he gladly leaps on the ground and hastens on foot to Rome; there he finds, a longed-for guest, the friendly roofs of brother citizens. He breathes again in mind, rests in body, gives and receives joys; enjoying their homeland, they restore it to each other, and confess thanks to God. Martinianus, rejoicing, tells sad things, relating to the brothers what he had endured. They mingle tears in the very congratulations, with overflowing hearts. Theridius, my man, was then away from there with me, a gift to me from Christ, a man of peace, a man of law, a man of grace, my rest, my delight, my mind; his fellow guest, Paulinus, with godly mind, was keeping the house in the city.

He strips Martinianus here of his shipwrecked clothing and covers him with his own clothing, and doubles the gift of the tunic with which he had clothed his companion with the gift of a hooded cloak. The giver himself then in turn, like one shipwrecked, remained in a single garment. After this Martinianus begins to make his way to us too, where flint paves the highway to which its builder Appius gave his name. He treads the much-trodden track; he who had come as a sailor in worn clothing treads it on foot as a traveller. But lest even this road be wholly free and empty of the usual mishaps, he did not escape unpunished the lazy decision by which walking irks him. From the city of Capua, which is twenty miles from the place of my dwelling, having found a mule empty of burden, as pack animals are usually sent back home, he sits on it, hired for a short way for a small sum; and soon in the middle of the road, the rider, thrown far off by the mule's fright, falls as his carrier is taken from under him. Falling on his face, he does not hurt his face; thrown on stones and brambles, he bruised neither face with thorn nor limbs with stone, caught by the hand of Felix;

who, not allowing the brother, already approaching his buildings, to meet danger in his own territory by the encounter with evil, removed the envious enemy; and the faithful confessor brought him, his vow fulfilled, into his places, and Felix the patron brought him in, a welcome guest, to our dwellings nearby. Asked about his homeland, he tells it, recounts his misfortunes, and gives blessed news of you. And relating a few words from your writings, as if he had sprinkled my lips with honey, so, offering me the sweetest taste from the little drops of your honeycombs, he made me long the more for the letters which he could not give me in my eagerness; but since he himself came as the reason for the letters, I saw your letters too, written not with the ink of a pen but with the stylus of the mind in a good brother. Unknown before, as soon as he began to be known, he became most dear as well. Grace shone out from within him, with speech as the messenger of the mind. “The good man,” it says, “brings forth all good things from the good,” and you know the tree by its fruit; so this man, sweet in word, chaste in faith, and shining with honest brow, flowed into our inmost being with a sweet stream of kindly love. Above all, boasting deservedly that he was your friend, he gave this reason to be loved the more.

For there is no harmony between night and light, nor does the wolf agree with the lamb. Hence also the prophet says: “As birds of a kind fly together into one, so justice always comes together with the good, fitting in quality with their ways.” So a kindred mind has woven Martinianus to you, equal to you though far away, and the love of such men is the mirror of your mind and the image of your faith. God, the blessed author and fountain of the saints, now chooses not only the foolish and the weak of the passing world, to destroy the lofty things of the world; but, as he himself said, now drawing all things upward, he claims also the lofty things of the world. Since he himself made both the small and the great, he joins both by grace, and those whom the Creator founded in one work he re-creates by one gift. Common unbelief has shut up all, that faith may mediate for all, so that the whole world may be subject to God, and every tongue and every rank may confess that Jesus, the one name above every name, reigns in the glory of the Father. To him now even the powerful of the world bend the knee and give their necks to God, and princes confess Christ as King and submit their sceptres to the cross. Purple and rags come together into one flock, in harmony under God as shepherd.

A common kingdom, one blood for all, highest and lowest, is Christ, who, though you were adorned among the glorious of the world in honour, letters and family, enriched you with a humble heart, so as to confer eternal height on you, and that you might be co-heir of the rich of heaven, here a lover of the poor. Blessed are you now, poor in mind, but rich in the hope in which the poor rejoice, who, cheated of the slippery goods of the world, will enjoy the joys of heaven. For them, in the deep bosom of father Abraham, the God of the living prepares a place set apart from the fire of the rich and refreshing with the dews of life. The sure token of so great a hope already shines for you with a great pledge, the offshoot of your stock planted for the Lord in the courts of Jerusalem. For, to make you like the faithful father, he asked a son of you, enrolling your seed in the seed of Isaac and asking for him as for Isaac, whom you, rival of Abraham's love, gave as a living victim, and, handing him over to God, you have now put him to death for yourself, that you might hold him safe more firmly. Now he remains a stranger to you and yours, without share in the earthly world.

Ready from his mother's womb, before he knew his father and his mother, or tasted good or could distinguish evil, blessed, he chose the good. And now the little one plays in the court of God and sings with milky mouth: “From my mother's womb and from the first day you, Christ, are my protector.” You too have heard what is said to the blessed: “Your seed will be mighty.” You have this too: “Of the fruit of your womb I will set on my throne.” This word of David, though it speaks of Christ, in Christ agrees also with those who in the fellowship of the Christian body will be set on God's throne. For you, fellowship with Hannah is laid open by the example of the sacred infant. This boy too, a Samuel, has grown in the temple of God, now a lamb and hereafter a shepherd. Let the hand of his diligent mother weave him an ephod suited to his stature, which spiritual teaching in God's word may cover with sacred threads. And let him be woven into the golden fringes of the queen's garment above, and as a Nazirite let him adorn his head, holy to Christ, with nourished hair, and let the beautiful head of his soul be armed with the hair of virtue, with active faith. And let no razor ever go up on it, cutting it, to the loss of his hair.

And like that Samson, mighty by the strength of his hair, long-haired with sacred power, let him lay low the lion, strangled by the strong arms of prayer, and gather the sweet fruit of noble victory from the mouth of the dead beast. But after this triumph let him beware, by Samson's example, of approaching foreign unions. The foreign woman, for me, is the law of the flesh, deceitful with alluring nets. If this law should be stronger than the law of the mind, it will drag him into the rule of sin; evil-counselling, with sweet words by the art of fraud, it makes a manly mind effeminate; it blinds the eyes of the mind and shaves the head, despoiling and disarming faith. In this respect I do not want our boy to be a Samson, lest he be mingled in a union which is followed at once by captivity, weakness and blindness, although that strong man afterward recovered strength with his hair regrown, and, led by the hand from the mill to be the sport of enemy exultation, gazing with his mind in the blindness of his body, called on God the avenger. And soon, his strength restored with his hair, he laid low the enemy's house;

when his hand, stronger than stones, enclosed its columns in a heavy embrace, the roofs, their props removed, collapsed to the ground and fell on him; yet even in death itself the mighty hero of God mixed his enemies in the ruin, and by a glorious death made up for himself the disgrace of a subdued life. He who had lived a slave while the enemy gloried, falls a victor, with the enemy overwhelmed, and dying killed more thousands than he had slain living. I want our son to imitate this: death by death, so that, remaining in the flesh, he may conquer the flesh and live to God, crushing the sins of the flesh. But I do not want him, subdued by the wiles of a harmful woman, to give over his mind to the joys of the flesh, and afterward become the enemies' prey, stripped of the strength of grace. Let him be Samuel in this respect: that, always holy and with hair uncut, through all the times of his life he may weave his sacred age with unbroken thread, and repay to old age the infancy begun in service. Let him kill Amalek and, savage for God in godliness, sacrifice the sins of the flesh, by whose slaying the devil will have perished, eternally hateful to God. Let Saul fail in him, and David reign;

let the small destroy the lofty, so that he may not be lofty with the spirit of pride nor livid with the evil of jealousy, but, with humble heart doing lofty deeds of virtue, may ascend the throne of the kingdom; and let him follow those earlier deeds of Samson, so as to break new ropes like threads, and not betray his faith, lest, cowardly, he lose his hair. Long-haired with the strength of heavenly works, he will break the bonds stretched round him, pull up the stakes, lay low a thousand men subdued by one right hand, because our strength and head is Christ God, who is the right hand and the power of God; by his power we conquer the serpent of a thousand wiles who attacks us. Let the soul be strong, putting to death its ass, the beast of the sluggish body. Let moisture, boiled away by sober labours, make the face pale and livid, and let victorious chastity, the flesh afflicted, consume the fires of sins. For as our outer man is worn down by the wearing of continence, then he who is within is renewed, made strong by the weakness of the conquered body. Then a thousand will fall at your side, ten thousand at your right, by a dry jawbone, if our jaw is kept safe by idleness, the jaw which is mobile with the use of eating, because the licence of a juicy body is blunted by fasts.

And then a triumph and a fountain is born for us in dried-up bones. The jawbone that gave a weapon to the fighter gives a cup to him who burns with thirst: bones fasting from the juice of dead flesh, as the Holy Spirit waters them. But the things which were done before by the saints as a figure were written for us to put into action, so that what our fathers carried out in the body we may carry out in the spirit. The old things have flowed away, all things have been made new; truth has emptied the shadow. The day of salvation is already here, winter goes away, and the earth blossoms with flowers. The voice of the turtledove, now heard, sings that the time of pruning is at hand. Let us feast, then, without the old leaven, in the unleavened bread of truth, because Christ our Passover has been sacrificed, and the kingdom of God is within us. Therefore, released from the old laws, we no longer live in shadow, we whom Christ himself, the Son of God, made head for the redeemed, has relieved of the cloud of the law and the yoke of statutes, as of a burden of hair. With this head we walk free over the foul head, the dragon conquered. For them the hindrance of hair was fitting, and the shade of the head, whose hearts a veil covered, clouding the sacred mysteries.

But we, the veil of the letter removed, in the light of his body see the truth unclouded, our face unveiled by faith. So let our boy be a nursling of law and grace, of both, fitted for spiritual glory, so that he may bring out things old and new. Strong with chaste acts, let him grow his hair and not know the iron of loss, so that he may keep his faith untouched by the sword of harmful doctrines. But again let the same boy, his mind uncovered from above by the light of the gospel, lay aside the hair of burden and veil, a servant of faith and free by faith. Let the law, as tutor, nourish him first with milk through the breasts of the prophets; let sweet grace feed him with the bread of angels and with honey from the rock. Let him be made drunk with the sobering cup from the fountain of the Holy Spirit. And you yourself soon, joined to your children, may you flourish for God like a palm. And see, your wife in the yoke of Christ overflows like a good vine, this strong rib for you at home and for God, on the sides of your house, bearing her husband's cares, caring for faith, the crown of her holy husband, nourishing your children in chastity, renewing their life for God.

For I believe this branch, spread from your vine, is to be strengthened by God thus, that the branch may himself become the root of his root and draw his stock with him. As that boy of old, by God's providence, sold away into slavery, was sent to the fields of grain, so that he might go before his father and his brothers, and soon, when famine followed through the world, be the feeder of his father and brothers, so this son has perhaps gone before you into the sacred house of bread, so that he may feed his parents and his brothers in the famine of this world, where the earth, more generous in bearing thistles for us, lacks the fruits of good things. And this one can be said to have been sold to a eunuch, because he is the slave of chastity, he who has been handed over to the authority and hand of Severus, a eunuch for the kingdom of God, by whose nurture, strengthened in faith and manly chastity, he will spit out with chaste, proud disdain the enticing pomp of the ensnaring world, like a shameless woman, and escape it by naked flight, and choose to suffer saving punishments rather than deadly joys. As that man once did, so now may this one endure prison for chastity, so that from youth, sitting alone and secluded in a silent house, he may love the roofs of quiet solitude and hedge his ears with thorns.

Let him prefer the house of mourning to houses of feasting, so as to sow joy by weeping, and let him bind himself willingly with hard laws, so as to loose the bonds of guilt, and put on himself the fetter of patience, wandering neither in place nor in sense. And then from lowliness he will earn lofty things, because he who casts down the proud raises up the humble and, giving grace to the small, resists the arrogant. So that Joseph was first made small, that he might be great; and unless he had been a slave, he would not have been mighty in the land of his slavery. Where he had endured slavery and prison, there he obtained a kingdom and wealth, and by enduring the chains of iniquity he received the rewards of justice. Let this one too be proved a guardian of his own body, so that he may hold the bars of the prison. If, from fear of Christ, he binds the vices of the flesh, he will be set over them as over prisoners, and over others still shut in the prison of the world and bound to the age he himself, free and now entrusted to himself, will be teacher and guardian. For he who has kept his own rightly has the custody of others, not that he should wish them to remain in the darkness of the prison, or the free to be bound, but to teach those received by his own example to be stripped of the chains of the world.

And, easily released from his own bonds, he will teach others to be released from crime, and, a good man, governor of his own mind, he will also steer the ship of the church. For how will he preside over his neighbours who does not know how to govern himself? But my speech has slipped and run too far; I shall return to my Joseph. Let him, chaste, flower with the bloom of blessed grace like the lily of paradise, and, modest, with pure heart drink the draught of heavenly prudence; let him, a secret interpreter of God, give answers to doubting mortals, and with the shining glory of good fame become known in the King's house, and, pleasing to the King by the spirit of prudence, be taken up as leader of the kingdom. Let him go as chief of the royal possession, set over a great house, but let him wear a robe of fine linen and a golden chain, insignia fit for Christ; let him put on the woven garment of heavenly grace, robed in innocence. The garment woven of fine linen signifies unbroken faith by its strong thread; for threads of fine linen are said to be stronger even than ropes of broom. Instead of a chain, let him put round his neck the very sweet yoke of golden love, which, sweet to Christ and not troublesome in weight, binds the neck but does not press it.

Among these let him also receive the ring, the sign of royal authority, and, adorned with the threefold gift of the Trinity, let him be carried in the royal chariot. For the royal chariot of Christ is his flesh and his holy body, the church, in which he himself, God, the charioteer of Israel, is carried by thousands of rejoicing ones. Imitate Christ; do good, avoid evil, live the life of heaven on earth. And the King himself will set you in his chariot and make you sharer of his kingdom, and will entrust to you the highest rights of his kingdom and open his treasures. But first he will bestow worthy pledges, so that, adorned with royal insignia, you may ascend the lofty throne of the King and unlock the royal storehouses, wearing the necklace of wisdom, the robe of glory, and the ring of faith. But as that man, mighty through all Egypt, was a foreigner to the soil of Egypt, so let this one too, mightier than the powers of the world, be strong over Egypt, but a pilgrim from the house of the Egyptians, so mingled as not to be mingled, and let the holy race, though in a common dwelling, stand apart from the unholy nation; for now, placed in this world as in Egypt, let him so linger in it as to be a stranger to the business of the world, an inhabitant of the heavenly city.

Living in the flesh, let him be an exile from the life of the flesh, walking in the law of the mind, and let him travel through the whole land of the kingdom entrusted to him in the sacred books. And as that godly man of God, Joseph, went round the borders of Memphis and, gathering the glad riches of fertility in enlarged granaries, rich with the goods of the overflowing years, fed the hungry times, so let this boy of ours walk through the kingdom of God in the sacred writings. For Scripture, breathed by the Holy Spirit, is the mother of the everlasting kingdom, and let him, providing with spiritual care, build ample granaries of the mind, so that he may store abundant food of eternal life in an enlarged breast; and when he has made his land rich with life-giving substance, then you, to enjoy the power of your son, will go like Israel as an old man, and will enter gladly, summoned together with the company of your kindred. And your son will feed your old age in the King's house with the bread he has gained, as the eagle's chick is said to feed its parents in return by mutual care, when the force of old age makes them featherless again, and to bring them back to the nest to be fed, until they are clothed in a body feathered anew and blossom with new feathers.

The old, turned by a new way of nature, have become chicks to their children in turn. But when youth, purged of old age, has made them swift fliers anew, they begin again the forgotten oarage of wings with their children as teachers, and, mingled with the chicks who fed them, they fly together with gentle impulse through the air; it delights them to cut a liquid path through the serene sky in slow sweeps on high, and, calmly fanning the clear air, equal with motionless wings, while they follow one another and in turn go before, they crown it with a garland circle. And of their own accord the dumb birds speak the mysteries of the heavenly kingdom: their bodies, hung on their wings, unfold the sacred likeness of the mighty cross, and their flight, driven round in a circle, promises the reward of labour. So let this chick, son of graces, forerunner of your salvation, be the spiritual rival of the birds that travel through the high clouds, and, supported by the horns and wings of the lofty cross, let him fly to the crown of glory, he who is drawn from his own fountain, so that the whole fountain may flow into its vein; and you, bending down, follow your little stream, so that a river may go forth from all, blessed root of a holy offspring, as fruitful branches of a good tree.

You gave your son to God to be nourished, and he so nourishes you, that in turn the boy may nourish the grey-haired, a little teacher of the old, made, by a wondrous mystery of piety, parent to his parents. Then all, the whole company of the saints, to that body of the head to which the godly will be gathered like eagles, you too will go flying, which they will not be able to do whom the weight of their patrimonies forbids to be lifted from the ground. When first the trumpet thunders from heaven the signal for the raising of the dead, those who are now fat with the spirit of pride and puffed up with grey-haired riches will remain shackled on the ground, nor will they free themselves from their bonds, by which the faithless are now bound, as they wish, and will then be held fast, so that they cannot fly, because the tender clouds will not be able to carry the rich of the falling world, packed and heavy with their goods, to meet God the King; but the sudden ruin of death will overwhelm them, stuck in the mud of their own dregs and pressed down by the masses of their wealth, in the noonday burning of the world. May God the Lord not admit, I pray, the rod of such men into his lot, nor allow us to stretch out wicked hands to the fruits of these rich men.

You, then, great care of my heart, prepare yourselves light for Christ, and now, freed from choking packs, loose your feet from their bonds; that you may be clothed with abundant light, be naked to the world, so that when the prince of this world comes he may find nothing of his own in you. And may the clouds, bearers of the godly, easily lift you and carry you in their slender bosom, free from the mass of pressing things and pure of the stain of sins, and may God, the bridegroom King, flood you with his brightness as you are carried to meet him, so that the bright glory of eternal life may swallow up what is mortal in you, and, restored to the image above, conformed to the Master's beauty, you may live an everlasting age, unending like angels, with God the King.

Harmonious souls are joined in chaste love, a virgin youth of Christ, a virgin maiden of God. Christ God, lead these matching doves to your reins, and govern their necks, subjected to your light yoke. For your yoke, Christ, is light, which a ready will takes up and love carries with easy obedience. To the unwilling the godly burden of chaste law is heavy; to the godly it is a sweet burden to conquer the work of the flesh. Away from these bridal chambers be the wantonness of the vain crowd, Juno, Cupid, Venus, names of luxury. The holy children of a priest are joined in a venerable covenant; let peace, modesty and piety come together. For the love of piety is at the same time the honour of love, and peace in harmony with God is the bond of marriage. God hallowed the work of this covenant with his own mouth, and established a human pair with his divine hand. And to mark love the more as undivided, he made two remain from one flesh. For Adam, asleep, was deprived of a rib taken from him, and soon took a partner made from his own bone, nor did he feel the loss of his side, the flesh filled in its place, and he recognized that he had been doubled; and seeing another from himself in a companion body, he soon became his own prophet with a new mouth: “This,” he says, “is flesh from my flesh; this bone I know is from my bones; this is the rib of my side.” Now therefore, since under an ancient image a holy covenant is made between the children of Aaron, let sober joys be stirred with tranquil vows, let Christ sound everywhere in the voice of the godly people. Let no crowd make insolent riot through decorated streets;

let no one cover the ground with leaves, the thresholds with boughs, nor let there be a fanatic procession through the Christ-worshipping city; I do not want profane ostentation to pollute the godly. Let no breeze smell of foreign fumes; let everything breathe the cleanness of modesty. The saints have one ointment, which, poured out in the name of Christ, breathes God with a chaste fragrance. Let no dishes be adorned with superfluous gifts; uprightness is adorned with character, not with wealth. Let the holy daughter-in-law of a priest and wife of a consecrated youth now receive the dowry of light. Let her shudder at garments embroidered with gold or purple; her golden garment is the pure grace of God. Let her also reject necklaces picked out with various gems, so that she herself may be a noble gem for God the Lord. Let not the weight of hateful avarice press the neck dedicated to bear the yoke of Christ the Lord. Rather let her cultivate her character, to please by inner adornment, adorned with saving dowries. Let her not desire costly stones nor the fleeces of the Seres, to squander her revenues in vain; let her be adorned in soul with chaste virtues, so as to be not costly to her husband, but precious. For where the glory of bodily pomp is cared for, the human being grows cheap, depreciated by vice, and the mind, wrongly blinded by the lust of a depraved wish, grows filthy with the shining coverings of the body, nor does the shameless one feel what a disgraceful ornament he wears, so that he who pleases himself by his garment is lighter than his garment. Far be it that she should seem a daughter of an idol's temple, she who has been made the daughter of an apostolic family's house, her skin falsely painted with cosmetics, her eyes tinted with black powder, or her hair with yellow colour.

Scorning the pure beauty of nature with proud crime, she condemns in herself the divine work in her. In vain will this woman boast that she is chaste who adorns herself with so many varied adulterations. But you, young people of Christ, flee all things whose price lies in loss, whose use is in ruin. Believe the divine words, that from these adornments material for punishment arises for the greedy; Isaiah threatens that they will be girded with stiff rope who now wear silks mixed with purple, who drag tunics red with purple and rustling with gold with flowing folds to an ankle-length hem; girded with ropes, wearing sackcloth without end, they will grind great stones in the prison of the mill. And those who heap up their heads with nourished hair will wear shameful baldness on a bare head. Flee being adorned with such dowries, O new bride of a holy man; these things please empty minds. Do not wish to be recognized by noses, wandering with scented clothes and hair, wherever you walk, nor to sit with your head built up like a tower with a heap and twisting of braided hair, lest, having wrongly provoked many by your splendour, you be the wicked source of pestilent enticement. Nor should you, foul in mind, desire to please even your own husband by the increase of your body's charms. You too, holy youth devoted to the sacred books, spurn, as one who loves, the care of bodily beauty. For Christ has compensated you generously, adorning your beautiful soul with everlasting riches, and has adorned you both together with chaste dowries: hope, piety, faith, peace, modesty.

The word of God is silver, and the Holy Spirit gold, and good works are bright jewels for minds. If plain dress offends noble minds, and proud hearts delight in being courted by costliness, let the examples of the saints remove that shame, and the chaste simplicity of the first humans. Look at the ancient parents in the seat of paradise, to whom the whole world was one field. Yet sheepskins were their coverings; are we now ashamed to wear garments woven of spun wool? When beautiful Rebecca came as a holy bride to Isaac, she was covered simply with a veil of modesty. We do not read that she came adorned with various stones, but furnished with a cloak drawn over her, with whose covering she modestly veiled her face, a virgin fearful of the face of her bridegroom as he met her. Or will the dancing girl Herodias please more, who gained the Baptist's death as the price of her feet? Impious, she so avenged the anger of her mother's lust that she received a head as the price of luxury, that head, surely, from which the voice, the herald, had cried to the peoples that the Lamb of God was near. Whence did the impious dancer, a daughter worthy of her father, earn so great a crime, if not from her enticing dress? Yet by this crime she overcame him and compelled him, unwilling, into the deed by the allurements of a pleasing body. For by the art of her nimble feet she led the guests, worthy of the unjust king's feast, into assent. For if a yellow gold leaf had not covered her light soles, so that she might play more shamelessly with painted heels, and if she had not drawn her flowing dress in a curled train, her forehead flashing with gems, her hair poured back:

she would not, entering the corrupted minds of the spectators, have prevailed so cunningly for the unspeakable deed. Herod himself too, proud in his royal garment, swelled, mad, with sacrilegious pride, and, lifted up by his attire, forgetting the honour due to God, died, stinking, of a wound flowing with worms, paying what his deserts deserved, so that he should die filthy with ulcers who had believed himself a god by the honour of his garment. But, granted that royal things befit hearts puffed up with mad pride, what have we to do with Pharaoh? The hollow glory of the world is at odds with our kingdoms, nor does godly light come together with opposing darkness. Let the cleric love a wife made beautiful by Christ's adorning, and love her as beautiful by the light of the heart, and let the reader learn from heavenly history that she was made by divine gift as a help to her husband; and in turn let the woman, to be equal to her holy husband, receive Christ in her spouse with humble mind, so that she may grow into a holy body woven in its joining, so that the husband may be her head, whose head is Christ. In such a marriage the slavery of Eve has ceased, and free Sarah was equal to her godly husband. By such a law Jesus stands by his own who marry as groomsman, and changes water into the nectar of wine. It befits Mary, the mother of the Lord, to be present with these spouses, she who bore God with her virginity unharmed. For God himself built for himself a pleasing temple in the consecrated virgin by a secret rain, descending with silent gliding, as a shower from a high cloud falls with silent dew on a fleece. For no one was ever witness to this secret, by which God took up man from a virgin mother.

O new devices of the Lord for human salvation! A woman becomes pregnant in her womb without intercourse. A bride was not subjected to a husband as her spouse, and a mother by giving birth, she was not a woman by intercourse. She was a spouse by covenant, but she was not a wife in body; undefiled by a man, she was mother to a boy. A great sacrament, by which the church marries Christ and is at once the bride and the sister of her Lord. A bride as a spouse, she is a sister because she is not subjected. … Hence she remains a mother, conceiving peoples by the seed of the eternal Word and likewise bearing them. Hence she is sister and spouse, since without use of the body she is joined in mind to one whose husband is not man but God. By this mother the old man is born just as the infant; this offspring has no age and no sex. For this is the blessed generation of God, which is not of human seed but of the race above. Hence the teacher says that now there is neither female nor male in Christ, but the same body and one faith. For we are all one body, all members for Christ, for whom Christ is the head of the body. And since, having put on Christ, we now lay aside Adam, we at once tend toward the angelic likeness. Therefore this is the work for all born in baptism, that both sexes may attain the perfect man, and Christ, the common head, may stand as all in all, the King delivering his members into the kingdom to the Father. Marrying or being married, a frail stage, now passes away, when all are composed in an eternal body. So, remembering me, live always as an inviolable pair; let the venerable cross be your yoke.

As children of that mother who is bride and sister, take up hearts worthy of godly names, and, as brothers, run together to Christ the bridegroom, that you may be one flesh of the eternal body. Let the love bind you here with which the church embraces Christ, and with which in turn Christ cherishes her with love. Let the bishop, your father himself, bless you; let him himself lead the holy songs for the hymn-singing choirs. Lead, kindly Memor, your children to the Lord before the altars, and commend them, praying, with a sanctifying hand. But what fragrance glides to my nostrils, flowing from heaven? Whence does an unexpected light strike my eyes? Who is that man who approaches from afar with calm steps, whom abundant grace of Christ attends? Whom a blessed company surrounds with heavenly nurslings, recalling the image of the angelic host? I know the man whom divine fragrances accompany and on whose face a starry beauty shines. This is the man, this, rich with the many gifts of Christ the Lord, a man of heavenly light, Aemilius. Rise, Memor, revere your father, embrace your brother; both names are yours in one Aemilius. Memor is both the younger and the elder. Wondrous gift and work of the great God! He who is younger is the father; born later, he is the elder, because as bishop in his see he carries apostolic grey hairs in his breast. Memor is son and brother; he rejoices that there is present a common father for himself and his children. Justice and peace embrace one another in a twofold way, when Memor is joined with like-minded Aemilius. The fillet joins the bishops in divine honour; piety joins them as equals in human love.

Hence Memor, not forgetful of his duty, in right order hands over his dear children to the hands of Aemilius. He, yoking the heads of both under the peace of marriage, veils them with his right hand, and sanctifies them with prayer. Christ, hear the priests; Christ, assent to them as they pray, and to the godly vows of the holy suppliants. Imbue, Christ, those newly married by the holy bishop, and help their modest hearts through chaste hands, so that there may be in both the concord of virginity, or that both may be the seed of sacred virgins. This is the first grade of vows: that they bear limbs not knowing the flesh; but if they come together in body, may the offspring to come be a chaste priestly race, and may the whole house of Memor be a house of Aaron, and may this house of Memor be a house of anointed ones. Be mindful also of Paulinus and Therasia, and Christ will be mindful of Memor for ever.

Behold, the day, returned for us as the year is completed, brings back the light made illustrious by the name of Felix. It would be the time to bring out joys in glad words, if anxious times allowed glad voices. But yet, though amid battles, this day will be for us a day of joy and peace; let horrid wars rage far off, let free peace be present in our minds. The mind does not forget the sweet habit of joy, accustomed to loosen its breast in godly vows and to rejoice chastely before the Lord on festal days. Therefore drive away importunate sadness, though in a sorrowful time; good joys, sweet words, everything godly and glad let us love on Felix's day, a birthday without end, because on it Felix was born for everlasting ages, when, having finished the age of his body, he migrated to eternal life in heaven. So let sad fears depart, and joys return to refreshed hearts; it is fitting that all sad things flee the holy day, which the glory of so great a confessor makes shine out notable among all days through all time and adorns with crowded peoples. This day, even if I were living wretchedly subject to Gothic arms, I would celebrate gladly even among the savage Alans, and if many-yoked chains pressed my neck, the enemy would not chain my mind to my captive limbs; with my heart unbound, piety would proudly trample sad slavery. Even amid barbarian chains free love would sing my vows in pleasing words. So now, though wandering rumour through various regions strikes fearful ears with terrifying reports, yet let steadfast trust in the Lord Christ strengthen us and arm our minds, fixed with upright foot, and let not black fear draw clouds over this light, which God makes serene with the heavenly honour of Felix.

As once Moses the lawgiver, in the land of the Pharian tyrant, dedicated the sacred Passover under the first law, and holy Judea then, though the impious enemy was forcing them with strong violence to hasten their flight from his home, yet, bold with the freedom of a devoted heart, and undisturbed by fear, did not abandon the commanded solemnity, but, though trembling and fleeing, performed the divine festival, feasting on the saving lamb in glad gatherings, and, already victorious by the prefigured blood of Christ, led glad dances in triumph when Pharaoh was conquered (hence, mindful of the flight, even now the Jews, keeping the nation in name only, take unleavened bread, because once, driven out, they made their flight from Egypt with unleavened loaves; with like signs now, through ancestral rites, but now through empty sabbaths, they recall the welcome traces of the ancient fear; for they practise the old law in vain under an empty image, because for us Christ, given to the Father as one victim for all, has fulfilled the true Passover, and since the body of life is present, the shadow of the figure perishes): so therefore let us now, glad in a troubled time, all keep the festival of the beloved martyr with godly mind, with united zeal of cheerful piety. Perhaps this piety will the more bring us safety, if it pleases us to lay down our cares for this purpose, to bring rejoicing hearts to the confessor, in whose honour God rejoices, because the martyr scorned his own honour for the name of Christ the Lord, cheaper to himself so as to be more precious to Christ. Therefore let it please us to rejoice in such a patron and, rejoicing, our cares set aside, to keep the birthday of the martyr laid asleep in blessed peace.

This too will be granted to the devout, if affection for joy now stands stronger than the cause of fear to dismay minds with clouded breast. Believe that the foreign peoples are to be feared not for their arms or strength; the anger of an offended God moves them because of our sins, so as to rouse sluggish hearts by fear of death to care for life. So let us fear the gentle God in the savage enemy; let fear of the enemy be far from us, the enemy we deserve to fear by not fearing God; let us at least tremble, as force compels, before him whom, relaxed in calm peace, we neglect; let us, humble in grief, appease him whom, when he brings glad things, we soon spurn, proud from prosperity itself. Let us go back over the ancient examples of our holy fathers, who, enduring deserved scourges in wars sent upon them, did not think protection was to be found in arms or walls. To hope for salvation in human resources is no salvation. For mortal things do not drive off death. So let those who have care spend this time in the care of praying to the heavenly Lord, by whom sad or glad things are prepared, who alone can grant, by his heavenly rule, that joys be renewed again when cares are driven away. For God the arbiter rules and varies the affairs of men in this way, so that clear skies always follow clouds, and the rains flee again as fair weather returns. How great is the power of prayers, what medicine it is to weep before God, let Nineveh teach, saved by mourning, and Amalek, conquered by the lavish prayer of old Moses, and cursed Haman, destroyed by the prayer of holy Esther, who, the punishments well reversed, alone drank, impious, the evils he had mixed for the saints, and on the just cross, which he had set up for the Lord's servant, himself hanged.

So let faith, resting on God, strengthen trembling hearts, and, trusting God, anticipate a secure time in a sorrowful time, because there is no cause to fear except to fear God; whoever does not fear him alone rightly fears all things. Let those trust in legions and prepare walls as refuge with rebuilt ramparts who have no trust in saving Christ; the sign of the unconquered cross and our confession fortify us, and, armed in mind by God, we do not seek arms for the body; and though we seem unarmed in our limbs, yet we bear arms, with which even in serene peace we fight in our souls against bodiless enemies. Now we need God as helper, and he alone is to be feared, without whom even arms fall, through whom even arms are made firm; he himself will be a tower for you within the walls, he who without walls will be a wall. Let us go back from here over the deeds of the fathers, recorded in the sacred books, and see who had the better protection: those whom a city surrounded with great walls, without God, or those whom, without city walls, divine power fenced about with allied favour. I speak of that city which fierce Jesus destroyed, whose own name was changed into a name of power, which the leader did not subdue in the usual manner of warfare, toiling, as is usual, in a long siege; but, brandishing weapons by divine help through sacred mysteries, not plying them, an army with silent arms, he went round it with hands at rest, and for seven days repeated sevenfold circuits about the walls. He took them captive by the power of the mighty number and by the priests' trumpets with dreadful blast, imitating the thunderbolts of anger above.

Then the people who trusted in riches and city perished, with tombs mingled among their houses. Only Rahab the harlot, who kept chaste faith in a wicked nation, not trusting to escape by her walls, but by God's kindness, obtained the reward of her kindness, by which she was hostess to the Lord's servants under a safe roof, and, hiding them dutifully, deceived the wicked citizens, deceitful with a good deceit, lying with faithful mind. Because she had been faithful to the godly guests, unfaithful to the profane citizens, she soon found everything again, kindly given, in the Lord: life, homeland, home, scorned when God was preferred; if she had placed her protection in the city, she would have fallen, mixed in her native ruins, undefended by God; but the mystic harlot, foreseeing that Christ would buy the polluted nations with blood, marked her own roof with a scarlet fleece and received her salvation as her homeland perished, signifying that those are to be sheltered as the world falls whom the blood of the unconquered cross marks. Learn from this how much the blood itself avails, whose image saved. It has always availed for every good to trust in Christ, to entrust all things to the God of powers, to set God alone as the sum of all things; such faith has always availed above all arms; by such strength that little boy was great, who, stronger with arms scorned, struck down the armed giant with the power of a flint. We have known arms always to need faith, never faith to need arms. The faithful rod broke the sea, which drowned the arms empty of faith with their wicked prince. Kindly faith has clothed even women with manly courage, by which a holy woman killed terrible Sisera, his temples pierced with a stake;

Judith, by the cunning art of chastity, mocked Holofernes, who terrified great peoples far and wide, she who, not polluted in the impure bed, victorious, routed the barbarian camp when its leader was beheaded. Naked faith is armed by God; by the power of faith Hezekiah with a few thousands was stronger than that Sennacherib, whose kingdom was Babylon and rich Nineveh. He had moved the Assyrian powers and the Median kingdoms, and, trampling all the kingdoms round with great legions, was making for the sacred city of the Lord and attacking it alone with the whole mass of war. While he was preparing this, his impious wishes held back by other wars as God hindered, he sent ahead letters harsh with proud threats, which Hezekiah, grieving, took and brought before the Lord at the altar, and with tears poured out, washing the savage words as he read them, prostrate and praying with the people in mourning, he moved God, and by one prayer, victor over so grave a destruction, though absent he struck the Assyrians, God fighting for him, earning so great a saving that he should not even see the enemy he conquered. For after Hezekiah's complaining tears had passed beyond the stars, and complaints sent from a humble heart above the stars had struck the ears of the highest Father with godly voice, when the high doors of heaven opened, there glides down a winged angel, drawing a fragrant air where he glides, and, armed with the sword of the word, strikes the impious camp, and, triumphing in a silent slaughter of sleepers, gave a hundred and eighty thousand to one death, and one night was the witness of so great a war. In the morning the king rises, still threatening, and soon, wretched, his army destroyed, flees with a thin column, his arms emptied, fleeing Hezekiah, separated far off in another region, whom just now, as if present, he had threatened with chains.

Then, as Isaiah was intercessor for Hezekiah, so may Felix be for us with the Lord at this time. Let us cast our cares and fears on him and pour them over onto him. Our weight will be a light burden for him, because what is a burden to the small is light to the great. So God himself bore the sins of men and did not take them in, and, suffering death, did not bear guilt on the cross. He lost his life that on the cross he might restore mine; he was made guilty, lest I be guilty; among the wicked he died condemned, to separate us from the wicked. By a godly death the Lord died for me, that I may live for him and deserve always to live the life of him who lives. So the martyrs are the more important members in his venerable body, among whom Felix, of notable strength, shines among the sacred lights of the divine head, rightly strong with God, because they suffered things nearest to Christ's. Let us run together to this patron with united hope; he will receive our complaints with calm kindness, and while we celebrate his birthday rejoicing, he will kindly support our prayers with his high merits, and will weep for us in turn, because with dedicated mind we rejoice for him. This is no new care for the saints, to entreat God for sick sinners, and by the force of good merit to overcome bad merit. We read that Moses, praying when the people sinned, quenched the heavy anger of the eternal avenger, and that, when the fiery rain flooded the Pentapolis, Lot, fleeing, set little Zoar apart from wicked Sodom and, mighty by chaste prayer, freed the city and took it as chosen for his home, because in a modest dwelling he had remained upright, an inhabitant of an incestuous land, mingled with Sodom's houses but a stranger in morals.

Why should I speak of heaven shut and opened again by the prayers of Elijah, and of famine remaining on the earth and salvation returning at the holy-speaking mouth of the lofty prophet? As the old age once had these, so now let our safety, having received Felix as its lot, ask for all it dares, and hope for all it desires, trusting in such a patron. Holy Felix, beloved of God, right hand of God, be, I pray, a most fortified tower for us. For the God of Abraham is your God, and the God of Isaac and the God of Israel is your God; he who divided the Red Sea and sweetened the bitter spring, he who gave manna from heaven, gave quail by the south wind, and watered the thirsty ground by striking the rock, he himself is your God, who went before the people following him through the deserts, and by the alternating law of time changed the column held out before them by night and by day, and who for forty years in the deserts fed the people with angels' bread from heaven and refreshed them in their thirst with a rock broken into rivers. Ask, I pray, that Christ may come calmly to our side; he himself is your God, by whom mighty Joshua commanded sun and moon to stand for his triumphs; and when the Lord has assented to the prosperity of the Roman empire for you, command the serving elements, Felix, to serve our good; let the day go on lengthened with the stars standing still; let the sun stand for you, and let the moon, in concord, hold still, keeping the stars suspended in a fixed course, until Roman victory reaches its end.

As in Assyria Daniel, victorious by poured-out prayer, tamed the lions at Babylon, so for you, Felix, let savage barbarism be tamed as Christ breaks it, and let the captives lie around your footsteps. So once the beasts lay around the prophet and soothed the feet of the one praying with kindly tongues, God changing their nature, so as to condemn men savage in bitter mind by the human peace of beasts. So also the flame confounded the cruel tyrant, as he watched the furnaces serve the holy boys, and the men he had condemned sing, while his ministers burned. How could wretched kings defend themselves, who raged with minds so degenerate from humanity against those whom both wildness and flame spared? But as, while the boys sang eternal hymns in response, a dewy wind scattered the kindled fires, so may the grace of Felix with calm breath, as God breathes on us, temper the fires of war for us, and, repressing the conflagrations that have risen in the lands of Romulus, cool our anxious heat now with calm peace, and release weary hearts, our cares extinguished. But why, foolish, as if I were an inexperienced guest of yours and forgetful of you, do I appeal to you by the examples of the ancient fathers to give help in our needs, help which, God granting it to you, you will make come to us? The examples of your own powers suffice me, Felix, nor does Christ pour out heavenly gifts to you more poorly than to the fathers, whose noble offspring you are.

For you, Felix, are equally a son of the patriarchs and of the apostolic stock, no degenerate heir of so great a seed; as a confessor of the holy law and of faith together, you, holy one, bear signs rivalling your fathers' virtues, and if the form of your works is different, your virtue is not unlike; grace is diverse among us, glory equal, since there is one fountain for all the saints and a common kingdom of God; the works of the prophets and the sacred martyrs are not one, as the times were different, nor do deeds distant in their causes agree in their signs; they differ among themselves by the heavenly gifts of God, equal in merits. If Felix did not do or suffer all the same things that Daniel did or suffered, and the den did not hold him, nor did terrible lions surround him, neither did Daniel suffer for his Master's name the same things, scourges, chains, fears, and the night of a black prison, which Felix bore, horrible as they were. He who shut the beasts' jaws, making them gentle to the praying prophet, who made the fires cold for the praying boys and gave them moist garments in the midst of the furnaces, he himself has given Felix, mighty by lofty right, to command the pestilent legions of Satan, in which he restrains all beasts and fires. For what serpent, what beast is not in that crowd? In short, I shall tell one of many, so that from one you may learn that the demons have bestial senses. A certain man, not long ago, was distended by so monstrous a demon that he not only would consume in an easy gulp the familiar food of men, even if a table were given heaped with much fare, but also would tear apart with rabid mouth hens snatched from the doorsteps of the inhabitants as soon as he had seized them, and devour them uncooked, the feathers not choking him.

Moreover he thirsted for the gore of carcasses, and licked bones, chewing the thrown-out corpses of cattle, a foul table-companion of dogs. This man, delivered just now from so great a demon, see, now sober, works a rented little field far away, and, God caring for him in the holy hall of Felix, restored to himself, he shows by a clear enough sign that Felix, strong by merits and the name of Christ, tames monstrous beasts and conquers flames. Say, you who are present as witnesses of the works of Felix, does he not tame beasts and fires, when he presses the demons who break souls with vices and bodies with diseases, who burn man with flaming desires and devour him with sins? Tormenting and putting these to flight, does he not tame beasts and fires? Felix, the fiery avenger of the fire-bearing troop, roars and crushes the guilty flame with the fire of God; the fire of darkness is conquered by the godly fire of light; the demon flees, and God enters; and the man becomes a house well turned, a happier hall, with God as possessor, having disowned the foul tenant. God is a white and healing fire; with this fire my Felix glows, to quench the kindled demon and to cool the released man of the burning enemy. Wondrous hand and mighty rod and lofty power! Felix intervenes within one body among spirits mingled in a hostile pact, in the hidden places of the breast, and, finer than they, divides the slender breaths, separating the soul from the demon, so that, the demon expelled, the mind, free, receives the man again. This work is equal to that work by which the image of the cross changed bitter Marah into drink for the people by the sweetness of the sacred wood.

So Felix, mighty in piety because he is a noble confessor of the lofty cross, changes the man himself like the bitter cups of Marah. He who, just now swollen with a bitter demon, belched a viper's taste through foaming lips, often leaping up with heaving of his sides and sobbing of his wide throat, belched bitter blasts, now, wholly himself, a man returned to his own control, tastes sweet, breathes soundly, and speaks calmly. So the right hand of power girds Felix too. Hence, mighty, he devours the various arts of the prince of darkness as the rod of Moses devoured the magicians' serpents. See, we perceive equal riches of the heavenly Lord present for the merit of Felix, and the forms of works agreeing, and that whatever proofs of God the holy fathers produced in the body, Felix, living in Christ without the body, performs, and, mighty in mind with notable soul, while the bones of his laid-down body rest, shows forth by bright signs, before the day of return, what crown he will wear for his merits when Felix stands restored to life in his whole body. All the saints will shine, each with his own light, equal with unlike splendour, nor, with Christ as judge, will one grow at the expense of another's merit; Christ will be kingdom, light, life, crown for all. Behold the teachers of the old and new testaments, distinct in act but yoked in honour, in whom one wisdom gave twin laws. And so equal glory weighs out varied powers. Peter did not break the sea with a rod, nor did Moses walk on the liquid of the sea; yet one honour shines for both, since there was one author for both of dividing the waters with a rod and treading the waves with feet, who is the God of the old saints, and himself the God of the new;

by whom the law was given, from him grace came; he who is the God of Daniel and of the three boys is himself the God of Felix, nor is God himself less in holy Felix, through whom he exercises good gifts and healing powers on land and sea. For every day we are witnesses, from everywhere, in frequent gatherings, either of the healthy paying thankful vows or of the sick seeking and feeling various healings. We see too many brought from a foreign shore, prostrate before the sacred hall of the holy martyr, while they give thanks, telling the dangers they endured, testifying that, their ship dashed by strong storms, they were snatched away, God pitying them, and by the very hand of Felix leading them out had emerged from the depth of the sea and gained, calm, the safety despaired of, since by Felix's merits both waters and flames yield. To be silent about past proofs of his mighty merit, we know by experience; fear from recent terror still makes our remembering minds tremble as we recall the fire we endured when our roofs were almost consumed; though the flame is extinguished, its traces are still warm in our minds and heap up love for great Felix, whom we saw, almost present in bodily act, setting his hands against the flames and guarding our thresholds joined to his; the flame, almost touching them, feared them, as if terrified by the face of the saint standing in the way, and, driven back from seizing the roof of our house, burned itself out close by in the ruin of a neighbouring hut. I shall tell wonders: the air stood motionless without breeze, nor did the wind give any trembling to the leaves of the groves, so that the swift fire could not advance further, flying through the joined beams of the neighbouring houses, but, deserted by the falling winds, the flame refused to go on and died, weak, its fuel consumed.

In like manner, Felix, release us by your help from dangers, and let evils not draw near our houses, and, driven back by you, let horrid wrath with its bloody scourge sound far away. Put on also, for keeping wars away, that power by which, when a river flowing wrongly down from the neighbouring mountains, swollen by sudden rains, overflowing with its torrent, often rushed headlong upon your thresholds so that it violently shook with vast waters the dwellings joined to your roofs, you, turning the stream, made it change its ways, so that now a new channel leads it, raging, through an unaccustomed region, avoiding our roofs with a distant course: so now turn away from our places the battles coming in a war-sounding river. Let the impious hand keep off the sacred borders, whose rampart is your grace, and let the enemies fear your hall as the demons do, and let not blood violate what flame and wave have fled.

Be born, day, who are always restored to me with slow rising and soon hasten to your setting and flee, slow to return, winged to depart. For I wait for you, lingering through long times, while the struggling wheel of the slow year turns, with my breast stirred by intent vows. How I should wish that you shone for me all the days, or, whenever you come, that you so made up for your delays that you could prolong the light to summer's length, or match that day which, the stars bidden to stand, wearied the world with long light, doubling human labours with night put off. Now the law of winter time steals you from us, dear day, with too swift an air, and winter, quick in light, slow in darkness, compels the shortened hours. But it is well that for you, Felix, to whom grace is perpetual, the sun shines as Christ illumines, and he himself flashes his own radiance on his birthday, nor is the splendour of eternal honour ever buried in setting falls. Go, fugitive day, slip away; I will not call you back, nor will I now complain that you are short, because without you Felix always shines present for me with unquenched light. If the birthday is absent, it is more that he himself, the light of this birthday, is continually present. For he does not become holy by a day, he whose honour is the cause of celebrating the day. But if it is the crowd that makes the birthday surpass the other days, running to the sacred thresholds more densely than usual, we see Felix's birthday kept almost always with a crowded people. For what day, I ask, rises empty of vows or thin in great throngs? Yet I shall confess that this day rightly retains a special honour, on which once, his age completed, it fell to Felix to lay down his earthly garb and be called to the lofty stars, to be kept in the blessed seat.

For this reason confirms faith, which marks off times with sure titles and designates sacred days through yearly festivals, on which the ancient fathers once trembled at the Lord's miracles, dreadful to the wicked and always to be celebrated by the godly, because they were helpful to the saints and hard on the wicked. Witness the land of Memphis, and the sea then made land for the saints, sea for the wicked, and the other things like these done by God in Egypt and in many regions, recalled by us with remembering love. So likewise the divine gifts of Christ are celebrated: as the day venerable to all on which God, born of a virgin, took up man for all, and then the day on which the magi, bringing mystic gifts with a star as guide, saw the boy as suppliants, or rather the day on which the trembling Jordan washed him as John dipped him, him who hallowed all waters for the re-creating of the nations, or whether the same day is more sacred by that sign by which God first did a work, when, the stream turned, he changed water into the nectar of very sweet wine. What of the Paschal feast? For certainly the church in all regions proclaims the Passover continually every day, witnessing the death of the Lord on the cross, and from the cross the life of all; yet this great sacrament of great kindness toward all the whole world everywhere adores every year, in the prescribed month, with equal service, celebrating the eternal King with his body restored to life. A day follows this solemnity (we count seven weeks, and the festal light returns for the peoples), on which once the Holy Spirit, sent down from high heaven, divided tongues with fiery light, and he, one God, ran through various mouths and sounded tongues of every kind from one mouth, granting all to bring out voices unknown to them, so that each recognized his own nation in a foreign mouth, and did not know the foreign tongue in his own mouth.

The barbarian himself sang words known to others but not known to himself, speaking what was foreign to his own people; but in all one Spirit praised one God with varied voice. As one who makes music on lyres with the stroke of one plectrum moves discordant strings, or one who rubs his lips on the woven reeds blowing through them, though he brings one song from one mouth, does not sound one note, but tempers varied sounds with masterly art, and governs the shrill holes with breath and with mobile fingers closes and opens them, so that the sweet breath, modulated, may go and return in quick turns through the holes, running in an airy course, and the animated pipe may unfold uninterrupted songs: so God, the one modulator and arbiter of all-sounding harmony, which he moves through all the bodies of things, God, maker of all nature and art, in every work fountain and end, making good things and keeping those made, himself abiding in himself in mutual kindness, in which the Father reigns in the Word, the Son in the Father, without whom nothing was made, through whom all things sown consist in him, the same who renews all things by the Word as beginning, he who, by the cross purple with the dye of precious blood, lofty in winged ascent, penetrated the heights on a cloud, flying above the Cherubim, and sat at the right hand of the Father, and thence poured out heavenly gifts on his own: the Holy Spirit, proceeding from the Only-begotten and the Father, who, himself God coming from God, though present everywhere, yet rushed down there, fiery, with a visible descent, where the harmonious gathering of the apostolic company was met, and soon, with a new sound, as many men from every nation had gathered from the city, sat like a flame upon all, and at once in all, discordant with one breath, as one who plays lyric strings with an easy plectrum, sang the same proclamations with divided tongues, striking varied voices through human instruments.

When such drunkenness filled the chosen minds, drunken hearts belched out sacred praises to God with fasting throat; who will pity me and give me to drink from that river which sobers by drunkenness? So, as the Lord marked the sky with stars and the fields with flowers and the years with seasons, so he marked the seasons themselves with festal days, so that sluggish natures, at least when a distinction is made after an interval, might gladly perform the holy solemnities with returning vow, and idle minds might through the yearly festivals be prepared for the Lord, since it irks them to serve justice continually undefiled, and for those used to sinning it is labour to refrain from sin. One runs down every valley; there is no escaping up an ascent by running. Hence the way of falling is more downhill, and the way of life harder; the one roomy for many, the other steep for few. Hence the good Lord, to cover all with the wings of kindness, gave fitting intervals of holy days for the weak to strive toward the citadel of virtue, so that at least by moderate services they may grasp the hem of Christ's garments, and even the fringe may heal those who, not wholly exiled from the region of salvation, stable within the stalls of everlasting life, far from the first rank, not far from the second. For the first grade of life is to weave all days with continual goodness, and through all time to celebrate the sacred Passover of Christ with chaste worship. But if a crop mixed with thistles sprouts for me and the thorn of earthly toil goads my uncultivated heart, let me at least be eager to offer myself to the Lord on festal days, so that at least with part of myself I may touch the borders of life, lest I be dragged with my whole self into the fellowship of death.

So although we, who dwell nearby at a close station, enjoy the continual honour of our holy patron, whom a devoted crowd always celebrates even apart from his birthday, yet, that we, his own home-born servants, may be relaxed from cares through our master's festivals and sing our vows, I shall go as leader of this joy for the psalm-singing brothers and lead the allied column like a standard-bearer. For though crowds from various regions of the people pour out godly joys today with like vows, yet it befits me to exult more abundantly and more notably on this day, because no one is more bound as debtor to him, for whom, under a more special private star, this day has borne so great a patron without end. Hail, dear day, hail, my light, hail, always festal for me; but in this year you have risen and shone more brightly for me, because with Felix's honour you bring back Niceta, so that by the love of two saints I may have a double birthday today, on which, celebrating the departure of the martyr taken up in body and the return of the bishop, here present in body, I worship, filled, receiving Christ, who dwells in my humble breast. Let my soul now exult and declare what once the bride sang, loving, to the loving Lord: “The rain is gone, winter has departed, the voice of the turtledove sounds in our land, the vine gives its fragrance,” and we marvel at the lilies of heaven flowering on earth. Whence suddenly, I pray, with the season turned, does the year make spring, and flowers are seen in icy fields? Niceta is present, joined as companion to the friends of Christ the Lord; hence winter flowers, hence on every side a quickening breeze breathes fragrant vapours on us; this comes from the heart of a field blessed by the Spirit.

A life of modesty and a mind white with clear truth make Niceta, flowers and spices of Christ. What can I, poor and foolish and little, bring forth worthy of so great a gift, from heart or mouth? Now I need Felix himself, and in this I ask him the favour that he take from Christ riches to impart to me himself, so that I may thank him worthily. And now I would wish that living rivers of everlasting water might flow from my belly, so that I could tell, not with my own mouth but by Christ's gift, my joy, which by Christ's gift floods my calm breast more richly than usual and doubles Felix's birthday for me with manifold love. I see Niceta smiling at me face to face with present eyes, and, seeing my parent, whose love reigns in me above all others, I myself become Niceta, bearing in mind the likeness of the blessed name, my mind which now triumphs in a victorious vow. Seeing him come, after a long time and from far away, to your birthday, most illustrious Felix, shall I not confess that he has come with your hand leading him? For who could fail to see by so clear a sign that this has come about for me by your prayer: that what I could scarcely grasp in my vows, or even imagine in my very sleep, I should hold Niceta again face to face on the very birthday of Felix, with sight and embrace together, and sing again under his eyes my due, Felix, with you as listener? But what shall I do, I ask? Poor, I sit at a rich man's table and, wretched, dare to put my hand in great dishes; nor do I consider that it befits me to prepare in turn such things as I take, and to give a word worthy of such a judge.

So grant to your poor man, holy one, that I may dare to speak things worthy of you as patron and likewise worthy of your friend. I call on your kinsmen, Felix, with you, to your festival. What I call your festival is mine, and these are more truly my vows; for your lofty honour refuses earthly joys. But since our joys belong to your palm, and you deign to count the vows of your own as yours, therefore I implore your kinsmen too, Felix; be present here too, and ask that, called, they be present for me now. You who dwell in the glad gardens of paradise in heaven, and you who rest beneath the lofty altar of the Lord, the beautiful choir of the apostolic band, and the patriarchs, the earlier race, both choirs of chiefs, whom in a double column God marked as fathers by twelve names for calling the nations and peoples to the heavenly kingdom; you too, holy prophets, I beg as a suppliant, who foretold that God would be in our flesh; you also, martyrs, who with bodies slain and blood poured out bore witness to the Lamb slain and living; all, one offspring from divine fountains, whom godly Abraham, holy Isaac, gentle Jacob begot for God through an innumerable seed, divided by heavenly and by perishable merits, equalling with the former the stars of heaven, with the latter the sand of the earth. I believe indeed that you have gathered from everywhere for this day by the duty of piety, out of love for Felix, to celebrate the honour of your fellow confessor.

But I am not so presumptuous about so great an honour as to pray that all the saints should at once breathe on my senses, as though I were worthy of so great a gift, so that the voice of the turtledove might resound from my mouth, the voice which the glad earth heard through the whole world; but because a divine voice befits the honour of Felix, and because Niceta, the Lord's servant and priest, sent to me now from a distant land, has come for this day, behold, a man as good with teaching mouth as he is holy with conquering mind and conquered body. O if only a Cherub would take a coal with flaming tongs and bring it from afar from the very altar of the Lord, and burn the badly fattened lips of a sinner, so that, my mouth purged of its clotted dirt, I might bring out more worthily with my mouth, not as from my mouth, but as from the mouth of my hearer, what I have drunk from his, lest the harsh and sick speech of a stupid sinner both violate chaste ears and lash learned ones! But since my teacher himself sits at my side, close by, opposite, I shall often look at him with reverent eyes; perhaps from the mouth of the wise, as once the exhausted ewes of the shepherd Jacob, I may conceive fruitful thoughts in my barren breast. For Niceta too, blessed by the Lord like that gentle Jacob, like Israel, shepherd of sheep and goats, sits before the pool of living water; here too he chooses for himself with equal heart three rods from three trees, by which, placed in the water, he calls the flock, and makes those coming together pregnant, and colours what they conceive with the three rods, so that the offspring of the holy flock may be proved marked by the rods variegated by peeling the bark. But the mark on the flock is not Laban's, but the mark of life;

for not to be marked for Christ will be the mark of death. So grace renews barren souls in the threefold name, and the Spirit, as husband, fills them by union with the Word, and the church, fruitful with virgin womb and mother of salvation, marks within the offspring conceived for God, while, intent on the three rods, she drinks the moist seeds of the Word and is sealed with the light of the eternal face. Hence the barren has borne seven and the abundant has failed, God enlarging the slender and making the proud slender. So I, seeing Niceta, as if a fountain were found, ran like a thirsty sheep to the living streams, dry, and felt my udders at once grow full, and, long attentive to the mouth of the master as he fed us, I looked at the varied rods in his learned breast, and drank the colour seen through my fixed eyes, and his dewy mind sprinkled me with divine drops. But yet in these three rods, since mention has come, let us, if you please, look further into the mysteries of the kingdom. The patriarch chose three rods for himself from three trees: fragrant from the storax, smooth from the plane, firm from the nut. In the plane is the Spirit, in the storax the virgin, in the nut Christ. For the plane spreads its broad branches into shade; the Holy Spirit formed Christ in the overshadowed virgin; and the rod of storax, I think, is the virgin from the tree of David, who, a virgin mother, brought forth the fragrant flower. The rod of the nut is Christ, because in nuts the food is within, the shell outside, and over it, on the green skin, a bitter rind. See Christ, God veiled in our body, who is fragile in flesh, food in the Word, and bitter in the cross; the hard surface is the word of the cross, and the food of the cross, enclosing the heavenly marrow of Christ in the flesh.

But likewise sweet by the cross, because our life, God, brought forth life from a tree; my life hung on the wood, so that my life might stand for God. What, O life, shall I repay to you for my life, Christ? Unless perhaps I take the cup of salvation, which your right hand may offer to me, so that I may be washed in the sacred draught of a precious death. But what shall I do? Not even if I give my own body to the fire and grow cheap to myself, nor with my blood poured out, shall I pay you the just debts I owe, because I should give myself back to you for myself, and whatever I do in like turn, I shall always be unequal, Christ, to you, because you, Christ, paid for me my debts, not yours, suffering for wicked servants. What love could weigh against you? Lord, you took my form, that I, a servant, might bear your form; and is it thought a great thing to purchase one's own salvation with a perishing thing? To exchange the perishing for the everlasting and to sell the earth to buy heaven? Behold, how much more dearly God bought me by the death of the cross! He suffered, cast down in the image of a servant, to buy cheap servants with precious blood. But what am I doing? Rash, I am carried up on the unsafe deep, having dared to trust myself to the height on a fragile wing; singing, as is my custom, the birthday of the excellent martyr with lighter material, I have suddenly shot up to the heights, flying above the stars, and have stretched my bold mind to the fountain of things with my speech sent forth. Whence do I have this courage? What breeze lifts me, proud? I do not recognize my swelling breast; a greater mind drives me. I feel Niceta, while he sits nearest and touches me and breathes close at my side, joined to me. The keen spirit of the one breathing beside me enters, and, powerful, rouses an unaccustomed fire in me as I meditate, animating my cold fibres with kindling brought near.

But I shall restrain swelling blasts, nor shall I, small, presume to speak great things above me, and I shall be brought back small to the ground I left and go with the level foot of a modest song. Though I cannot speak the lofty merit of Felix without the praise of God, you, holy Niceta, receive me in your fatherly bosom, and while I am supported by your learned breast, laying my head on your kindly heart, let your salt season my insipidity, and your rich vein water my thirsting senses with an everlasting stream. I shall say again rejoicing, and, still scarcely believing this gift, I shall repeat, asking: tell me, I pray, have you returned, and do I hold you yourself, Niceta, on whom until now, sick, I have hung nights and days with wasting soul? Have you come at last, restored to me in the fourth year? But thanks to Christ, because he has brought you back, though late. How I feared that the enemy in the regions between would hold you shut off by the opposing cloud of wars! But with overcoming desires you broke the bonds that stood in our way, nor did sea nor any labour nor Gothic fears nor the hard cold of long roads hold you back; truly in such great perils, Niceta, you were conquered by affection and a conqueror with kindly heart, strong and weak alike, but both powerfully. Conquered by friendship, conquered by love of Felix, you conquered hard labours by tender piety. Now come, holy parent, give me your ear and your hand; let us knot our allied palms in mutual bonds, and, our right hands joined in alternate covenant, let us sow varied conversation as we walk at leisure.

It pleases me to tell and at the same time show my anxious parent what we have done through the whole time he was away. For to whom should I more rightly unfold my deeds and go over what was worked for us by Felix's hand, than to one to whom we are a care? He, by the twofold right of teacher and father, may approve well-done things and condemn wrong ones, correct errors and calmly arrange what is to be done, help the unfinished by prayers and, as priest, dedicate the finished, and so may move to and fro in the buildings of Felix as if he bore Felix himself in his whole heart and gloried in his father's hall. Come, then, father, and join me with companion step, while I lead you around through each of the works. See, this portico, where the first gate receives us, was formerly buried under a dark roof; now it has grown new with paint and roof. But where the forecourt, enclosed around with a square covering, opens to the sky in a middle space, there was formerly a little garden with ill-tilled turf; the cheap ground gave scant vegetables for no use. Meanwhile the love came upon us to build this work in this place; for the thing itself seemed to require this adornment, so that a gladder honour might light up the venerable hall of the martyr from afar, from the opposite front, with its doors opened, and the bright front, open through arches with double doors, might flood the inner parts with abundant light, turned to face the conspicuous tomb where the martyr is covered, asleep, his body laid down, Felix, who from the threshold of his shining throne looks in triumph on his courts, their double doors opened to the light, and rejoices that his walls are overcome by godly gatherings and that his ample halls are widened for rejoicing peoples, and the dense crowds let through by many doors.

And the hall itself, where the tomb of the consecrated martyr stands, purged of old age, has taken on a new appearance. A threefold hand has adorned it with various beauties: craftsmen of coffered ceiling and of marble, two kinds, and a painter with images bearing divine faces. See how great a splendour, as if the building were reborn, smiles in the carved coffering of the curving vault. In the wood, ivory is counterfeited, and from the roof above hanging lamps are held by bronze coils, and in the middle space lights wander and nod on loose ropes; a light breeze tires the waving flames. And what stood before on pillars is now supported by columns, and, its material changed, has scorned cheap rubble. But let us return again to the courts. Look upward at the cells set above the long porticoes with doubled roof, dwellings to be worthily marked out for the good, whom zeal for prayer, not care for drinking, has brought here to the just honour of holy Felix. For the upper rooms, as it were joined to the sacred roofs, look down from upper windows on the safe altars, beneath which the bodies of saints have their seat within. For apostolic ashes too, laid beneath the heavenly table, give back, amid the holy offerings, the fragrance of sacred dust that pleases Christ. Here is father Andrew, he who, sent as a fisherman to the Argives, taught vain-speaking tongues to be silent; who, after he had freed peoples from the broken nets of wicked error and drawn them to Christ's nets, condemned Thessalian Patras with his poured-out blood. Here also the forerunner of the Lord and baptizer, John, likewise the sacred gate of the gospel and the goal of the law, himself also coming as a guest to the halls of my Felix, honours his brother's grave with part of his ash.

Here lies Thomas, the doubter, with the double surname Didymus; Christ permitted him to doubt, by the hesitation of a fearful mind, for the sake of our faith, so that we too, strengthened with him as guide, may in awe confess Jesus, Lord and God, to live after death in a true body, showing the living wounds of his flesh, so that, when the day comes on which God will come manifest in open light, the rebels who pierced him may in fear recognize him shining in his tortured flesh. Here is Luke, a physician first by art, then by speech, Luke twice a physician; as once he cured those sick in body by earthly help, so now for sick minds he has composed medicines of life in a twofold book. With these, companions in piety, faith, virtue and crown, are the martyrs Agricola, and Vitalis joined to Proculus, and Euphemia, the martyr who on the Chalcedonian shores marks the shore consecrated with virgin blood. Bologna buries Vitalis, Agricola and Proculus, whom sworn faith called to the arms of piety and an equal victory covered with saving palms, famous, their bodies pierced with beam-nails. Here also is the martyr Nazarius, whom by the faithful gift of noble Ambrose I received with humbled mind; he too deigns to be a fellow guest under Felix's roofs and adds his brother's houses to his own seats. Although all the saints together, throughout the whole world, are wherever they are through the one God, through whom they are everywhere presented to God as members of his body, yet places have been assigned to the bodies of the saints, nor does the grace of those laid to rest live only where the whole body lies;

but wherever there is part of a godly body, there his hand appears, God bearing witness, as proof of blessed merit, and great power in the slight dust of the saints cries out the force of the apostolic body, the word bearing witness. So whoever lives chaste in the upper rooms will be neighbour to these, and the stranger from afar who, moved by right affection, has hastened to the holy buildings; when he wishes to go apart to pray to Christ, whether by day or by night he wishes to bring out his prayers, let the guest come forth, unwearied, from the adjoining threshold. Wonder at this also: that the martyr's house, by the lofty law of a sacrament, opens through three thresholds (for it confesses one kingdom under a threefold name); and that the buildings, woven together with masses joined to one another, signify by godly right that, though there are many roofs in the structured houses, yet there is one house of holy peace, and harmony makes one body of many members, whose joining stands firm with Christ as head. Perhaps amid these sights you may eagerly ask whence this rich court is to be filled with so many fountains, since the city is far off and almost no channel of water from the city sends a slight drop here by a slender course. I shall answer that we trust nothing to our own right hand, rely on nothing of earthly help, have laid all things on the mighty God and count on fountains from heaven. In short, we have built cisterns against the roofs on every side, to catch rivers from the clouds as God pours them, whence the hollow marbles may flow together with full lips. But if at times there should be a failure of waters, the court, set off in various shapes in arranged order, with shell-shaped basins and florid with painted pillars, will perhaps be worth seeing even with dry basins.

For you know too how great an ornament in Solomon's great temple was the dry sea, which the wise king made of solid bronze and set upon bronze bulls. Look now at the other side: how there is one portico, and the wall, with a space opening two ways between columns, joins halls separated in roof with an entrance between them. It is time to pass with roving eyes into this building, which, opened along its long side, gains space for its roof with the light of the sky, opening into the joined courts, uniting what is disjoined through inserted arches, and offers the peoples the spectacle of a watered field, which yet walls built round in an enclosure shut in, so that the sacred roofs may not lie open to profane eyes, and the covered parts may protect the open forecourt from the weather. Nor wonder that the sacred folds increase in space; the mighty glory of eternal Christ grows everywhere, the honour of the saints is heaped up, one God is known by all, because the Holy Spirit lights up the world, and the Son, the heir, reigns with the coeternal Father; hence godly grace, with the light of truth spread abroad, multiplies the seeds of eternal life for the peoples. And because the good shepherd increases his sheep, lofty Christ favours that the folds grow ample with the redeemed flocks. Enter these, bishop, singing psalms and hymns, and carry my vows to the Lord, and join your joys to my vows, celebrating the feast of our common patron. At a fitting time you will pray for the sinner to the Lord, who rejoices in the honour of his confessor. With this guide your prayers will be carried along a downward path; Felix will go before you to the divine ears, and as you offer devoted services with the sacred rites and psalms together, Christ will descend with calm divinity, to veil people and temple with sacred mist, pouring a snowy cloud through the covered sanctuaries.

Now I want you to see the paintings on the colourful porticoes in a long row, and to tire your neck a little, bent back, while you read everything through with face tilted up. He who sees these, recognizing truths in empty figures, feeds his trusting mind on an image not empty. For the painting holds in faithful order all that old Moses wrote in five volumes, and what Jesus did, marked with the Lord's name, under whose leadership the Jordan, its flood suspended, stood back, its waves fixed, before the face of the divine ark. A new force divided the river; part, the stream poured back, stood still, and part of the river, slipping into the sea, ran off and left the ford bare; and where the strong rush burst from its source it had heaped the waters high, held fast, and a threatening mountain of water hung in a trembling mass, looking down on feet crossing the dried deep, and on the dusty footprints of men carried with dry feet in the middle of the river over hard mud. Now run over with intent eyes Ruth, who in a small book marks off the times, the times ended with the Judges and begun with the Kings; this seems a brief history, but it signifies the mysteries of a great war, in that twin sisters split in different directions. Ruth follows her holy mother-in-law, whom Orpah deserts; one daughter-in-law shows faithlessness, the other faith: one prefers God to her homeland, the other her homeland to life. Does not, I pray, this discord remain in the whole world, one part following God and the other rushing to ruin through the world? And would that the shares of death and salvation were equal! But the broad way takes many, and irrevocable error snatches those slipping downhill in easy ruin.

Perhaps it may be asked by what reasoning this decision settled on us, to paint holy houses, a rare custom, with likenesses of living beings. Hear, and I shall try to set out the causes in a few words. What gatherings the glory of holy Felix drives here is obscure to no one; but the more frequent crowd here is country folk, not empty of faith but not skilled in reading. This crowd, long accustomed to serve profane rites with its belly as god, is at last converted, newcomers, to Christ, while they marvel at the works of the saints plainly shown in Christ. See how many come together from all the fields, and how, deceived in their simple minds, they err devoutly. They have left distant homes, scorned the frosts, not cold, with glowing faith; and now, see, in crowds they stretch their joys wakefully through the whole night, keeping off sleep with gladness and darkness with torches. But would that they carried on these joys with sound vows and did not mingle their cups at the holy thresholds. Although the fasting company resounds with better service, singing holy hymns with chaste voices and soberly offering praise sung to the Lord, yet I think such joys as the simple draw out in feasts are to be pardoned, because error has crept into their uncultivated minds; nor does simplicity, not conscious of so great a fault, fall away from piety, wrongly believing that the saints rejoice when their tombs are drenched with fragrant wine. So do the departed masters approve what they condemned? Does Peter's table receive what Peter's teaching rejects? One is the cup of the Lord everywhere, one the food and one the table and house of God. Let wines go away to the taverns;

the church is the holy house of prayer; yield from the sacred thresholds, serpent. Not sport, wrongly, but punishment is owed you in this hall; you mix mockeries with your own punishments, enemy. Discordant, you both howl in torments and sing amid cups. You fear Felix and foolishly spurn Felix; drunk, you insult, as one accused you pray; and, wretch, you revel before him as judge, by whose vengeance you are punished, burning. Therefore it seemed to us a useful work to adorn all the houses of Felix with playful holy painting, in case the shade painted in colours might capture through these spectacles the astonished minds of the rustics, the shade which is explained above by inscriptions, so that the letter shows what the hand has unfolded; and while they all in turn show and read over the paintings to one another, they may be mindful of food more slowly, while welcome fasts feed their eyes, and so a better practice may insert itself in them, astonished, while the painting cheats their hunger; and as one reads the holy histories, the honour of chaste works steals upon him, led in by godly examples; sobriety is drunk in by the gaping one, and forgetfulness of too much wine comes on. And while they spend the day looking over a larger space, the cups grow fewer, because, the time drawn out by marvels, few hours now remain for the feasters. From what remains of these things which we see done and painted, I suggest to you matter for praying for me, asking that, as you are doing Felix's business, you pray diligently for me. And it is fitting that you, who accompany him with godly mind, should reproduce him in the face of the mind and follow him in spirit, equal in love of me; for I, wretch, do not doubt that I am loved by the martyr, deemed worthy even of the love due to a little puppy, since my life, house, property, grace, glory, bread is Felix by God's gift. With him as protector, ask that my foundations be laid on the holy mountains and the tower begun be completed with unbroken effort.

From Genesis, I pray, gather this meaning for your prayer: that I may not remain earthly Adam, but be born from virgin earth and, the old put off, be formed as a new image. May I be led out of my land and be unlike my race, and hasten to the honey-flowing rivers of the promised land, saved from the fire of the Chaldean furnace. May I be generous with my house, like Lot, its doors always open, so that I may be freed from Sodom; and may I not turn my eyes back, lest, lacking the salt of the heart, I be turned into a pillar of salt. May I be offered to God as a living victim like the boy Isaac, and, carrying my wood, follow my kindly Father beneath the cross. May I find wells, but, I pray, may envious Amalek, the blinder of living water, not fill them up. May I be a fugitive from the world, as blessed Jacob was a fugitive from his brother Edom, and may I place a stone to be consecrated under my weary head and rest in Christ. May mine be a chaste love, and a horror of wicked love, so that, like inviolate Joseph, I may flee the enticements of the flesh, my body stripped of its chains, free of crime, and leave fleshly spoil to the world. For it is time to be far from embraces; the last day is at hand, the Lord is already near, it is time now to rise from sleep and, ready, to keep watch for the Lord's knock. May I have a good exodus from Egypt, so that with the law as guide, passing through the divided surges of my stormy breast, I may escape the red waves and sing the Lord's triumph with Pharaoh drowned; to him with suppliant vow, exulting with trembling and rejoicing with fear, I commend my labours, his own godly gifts. Support, Niceta, by prayer what I pray, and at the same time all of you who have gathered here together for holy religion, devoted to the Lord and giving thanks, say with me: These things, Christ God, we do for you on our behalf with slender and fragile provision; for things made by hand do not contain you, highest Creator, you whom the world with its whole body does not contain, to whom heaven is narrow and earth a point. But bringing devoted services to your saints without end, we venerate the great with slight honour, hoping, with them as intercessors, that you may set in us the perfect summits of your works and be present as dweller in minds built up.

In an old act a new thing is born for us, and the usual solemnities grow with an unusual vow, and both the material of my song and the birthday of kindly Felix are doubled in his buildings by these works, newly born, which you see shining out with lofty masses on every side, gleaming with equal adornment. Here, surrounded far and wide by long porticoes, the forecourts open with an enclosed covered space under the roofs, and open the sky to the eyes and the courts to those entering. There halls are joined with walls added, and, open both in their spread position and coming together, join rival roofs with interlocked beams, and stand out, variously beautiful with equal adornments, in marble, painting, coffered ceilings and columns, among which grace is also varied by modest cells; where one portico stretches in one line over a longer space, three openings set close together along its side lay these open, and three doors open with running lattices. Godly names mark the middle one, with painted martyrs whom an equal glory crowned in different sex. But the twin ones, which open on the right and left, faithful painting adorns with two histories each. The sacred deeds of holy men fill one: Job tried with wounds, Tobit with blindness; but the lesser sex holds the other: famous Judith, with whom mighty Queen Esther is also painted. The inner court smiles with various ornaments, glad with roofs above and with serene fronts open to the light, and below wreathed with snowy columns. In its open space stands a shining cantharus, which a bronze tower with latticed top covers.

The other vessels stand under the open air, arranged as little fountains, in which, set variously in pleasing order, the work of art differs while the vein of metal agrees, and one water flows from different mouths into the capacious basins. This court, joined to three basilicas, lies open to all, and from one place opens different approaches to all, and likewise receives in one bosom different exits from the three, spacious with its middle pavement; yet this, with rows of shining shell-basins, a series packed with closely set marble through five ranks, opens a wonder to the eyes and narrows it for those walking; but in the surrounding porticoes there is ample room for walking, and, with lattices set between the columns, for the weary to lean and look from there at the flowing pools, and to see wet floors with dry feet without treading them, and with pleasant rivalry to marvel at fountains leaping with calm murmur. Not only in winter is a pleasing convenience at hand, for the shade of the roof delights in heat just as sunny places please in cold and dry places in rain. On the other side lies open an outer court, which is likewise surrounded by porticoes, smaller in adornment, greater in level space. Before the sacred buildings it spreads a forecourt visible from afar, which, with cells built under a double roof through the joining beams of houses woven together, imitates the appearance of a fortress in the image of a wall, and spreads a forum broad for walking for gatherings. What sign venerable Felix lately gave in this place, I shall tell in a quick account.

In the middle of the field, opposite the threshold of the venerable hall, there remained two huts woven of wood, awkward in position and at the same time ugly to see, which, shameless, destroyed all the beauty of the works, blinding the view with a foul obstacle; for the door of the open basilica, darkened by the interposition of a small hut, lay open in vain, as if its doors were closed. When we wished to remove these, those who were lodging in those huts opposed us with words, and swore they could sooner bargain away their lives than be compelled to move from the places. That talk seemed contemptible indeed; but, I confess, it was itself a reproach to me; for I was weary even of winning by a quarrel. Meanwhile, one night, when the sleepers were beginning to take their first rest, behold, a spark, leaping from a hearth left untended, kindled in one hidden corner of those very huts a sudden fire from the straw of hay onto which it had happened to fall; and soon, spreading through the hut itself, it gained strength through the dry fuel and seized a huge flame from the fragile kindling; then, slipping easily through the rotten wood of the old roof, bursting out, it twisted the turbid conflagration in great whirls, mixed a hot cloud through the air, and hid the stars with black smoke. And its very wrath gave a terrible crash besides, resounding with the heavier crackling of fragile material, and the heat so blew on all the dwellings round marked out by the village settlers, and even on the fields farther from the village, so did the horrid light strike, so did the fiery rain sprinkle roofs set near and far with sparks flying far and wide, that we, suddenly roused by sorrowful laments on every side,

and, seeing everything around us lit as if in the open, the roofs flooded with immense light, we thought everything was seized by flames and burning, and that the very palaces of the saints were blazing with so great a fire, and that those flashes were reflected from all the roofs at once, flashes which filled even distant places with scattered fires and scorched the countryside with great heat, so that each feared the torches as if near his own roof, drawing in the burning heat close by and air infected with dire fumes. We, trembling, since our houses were in nearer danger, presumed nothing from our own help; for whence would strength and hands be sufficient for the weak to extinguish that mass, when the flame went on more inflamed by its own fuel, and, sprung suddenly from a small hut, was flooding all the roofs at once with threatening fire? So we run, relying only on faith and suppliant prayer, to the neighbouring threshold of my Felix, and from there with equal vows we run to the adjoining hall, and beg healing help from the power of the apostolic ashes, our faces laid beneath the altars set over them. Returning home myself, I bring out wood, small but great for salvation, taken for me from a fragment of the eternal cross, and, holding it in my hand, thrust it from afar against the opposing flames, as though holding a shield before my breast, with which I might cover myself and ward off the enemy, beaten back by the boss brought against it. Believe, and do not credit it to me, but return thanks to Christ and give just praises to the Almighty; for our salvation stands by the cross of Christ and in his name; hence faith, resting on the cross, helped us in this danger too, and the flame recognized our salvation.

Not my voice or right hand, but the power of the cross terrified that fire, and in the very place from which it had risen, as if the flame were hedged round by a prescribed boundary, compelled it to sink and be extinguished with a dying roar, and the storm born of ash to return to ash. How great the power of the cross! Nature forsakes itself: fire, which devours all wood, is burned by the wood of the cross. Many hands then, sprinkling those fires with frequent vessels, wished to conquer them with abundant water; but though they made up showers by exhausting the fountains, yet the fire, with greater force, had conquered all the water as the sprinklers tired. We extinguished the fire with wood, and a little splinter conquered the flame that water could not. Afterward, when fear had departed and the busy light had brought back the longed-for day, we went out to see the deeds of the night and to look with secure eyes at the traces of the extinguished flame, though still smoking far and wide. And we believed we would see very great damage to the houses, remembering the great terror and fire; but at once, when we saw things, our opinion diminished, and we see nothing burned except what ought to have been burned, and that one of those two lodgings had burned, which our hand would have removed if the flame had not taken it. But even in this the grace of Felix provided for us by a gift, in that, forestalling our labour, it furnished us a saving of work by useful flames; for the flame had left there a house like the burned one, not so as to allow it to stand and itself obstruct the double doors in the same way, but so that the flame might punish that tenant with this too, preserving for him what he himself would soon overthrow.

For he who had lately preferred his hovel to the holy roofs, first fined by the flame in one hut, soon begins himself with his own hand to destroy the other, and completes his own loss with swift fury, and laments his beloved houses and empty loves. Looking at the burned and the demolished roofs together, he marvels at the unlike ruins in a like heap, the two-coloured wreck of rubble and ash joined. Seeing that this triumph had been yielded to us without a quarrel, he accuses only himself, wretch, for whom no thanks for service remained, and the shame of punishment remains. Now, since the fronts have been opened, the obstacle removed, let us walk in speech and mind through these very spaces, rejoicing, and let us be carried into the holy halls, and marvel at the sacred figures, monuments of the ancients, and in three spaces read the two testaments, seeing also this reason with right sight, that the new law is painted in the old buildings, the old in the new; for it is equally a useful ornament for us, newness in the old and oldness in newness, so that there may be at once new life and grey-haired prudence, and, old in gravity and little ones in simplicity, we may draw a temperate mind from twofold age, joining different ages in our characters. There is also, set in the inner part of the greater hall, a chapel far in, as it were a daughter of that building, beautiful with a starry dome and curving with a threefold recess in arranged places; in the middle it shines with the fountain of piety, and wondrously renews and is renewed at once. For today a twofold renewal adorns it twice, while the bishop performs there the twin gifts of Christ;

he dedicates the venerable sanctuary for twin uses, joining the godly sacraments with the chastening washing; so equally the sacrifice renews the temple and grace the font, and the new font, renewing the man whom it receives, gives a gift, or rather, what ceases to be new by use, begins to hand over to mortals by divine use. For the font itself, once put into use for renewing, ceases to be new; but, always to be used for such a gift, it will never cease to renew the old. See this gift of the Lord, this likeness, by which, by Christ's gift, the same man becomes new and the old perishes, in the twin hall of Felix with its roofs restored. What had been old now appears to stand new also; for they had stood with a vast row of ugly pillars. Now, supported in turn by better columns given, they have gained increase of space and of light, and, their mould put off, have taken back returning youth. For in these a double grace of viewing shines, in which the renewed roofs vie with the new roofs in equal light; the age of the roofs differs, the appearance agrees; the hands of old and recent workers come together; in a like face one beauty adorns both works; things founded long ago come together with new. Nor is there any distinction for the eyes; one antiquity shines in old and new places; the black horror is hidden, and painting has given back youthful brightness to the aged roofs by pouring in the bloom of various colours. Hence the age of the works is confused, and newness shines outside on the walls, while covered antiquity lies hidden within; painted old age is covered with the face of youth, veteran age has flowered again into a girl's face;

and they are at once old and new, neither new nor old equally, not the same and at once the same, which is the figure of future and present good; for now too it is useful for us, the squalor of the old life wiped away, to be renewed with godly mind and to follow Christ and be prepared for the kingdom. Then also, when it is given to rise again as life returns, that order of the risen will be counted better which, its flesh flooded over with a shining garment, will change the servile form for the image of the Lord, and, conformed to God, about to reign with him, will receive honour, like Christ, but by the gift of Christ. This same likeness warns us to lay aside the old form and wear the new, and to abolish what is past, and to turn the mind and direct it to the future things of God, to draw fitting forgetfulness over past cares and bring into the mind the care of the heavenly kingdoms, and to die in mind to human affairs and the ways of this age before dying in death, and not to be released from the bonds of the body before those of sin. So let us be renewed in our senses, and let us hasten to shake far from our body the muddy acts of the earthly image, our garments shaken out, so that, the dirt struck off, we may give back the bright garments of body and soul pure. And not only committed sin but sin contemplated let us flee, like the disease-bearing air from the corruption of a corpse, with nostrils closed, as a sad smell. Solomon warns that sins are to be feared and dreaded like the face of a serpent, and says they are armed with the teeth of a lion; and truly, as with the wild mouth of a lion, they savagely devour the soul which sick pleasure of the body has conquered, and which, conquered, the dragon has led away as his food, he who devours the peoples of the Ethiopians, not scorched by the sun, but black with vices and coloured like night with crime.

The serpent eats such Ethiopians, in whom, condemned, he has the food that is his to take, because God called the sinner and the serpent's food by one name, earth, and the one who devours sins is himself devoured by the dragon bearing that name. The time is here to change our ways, to rise from sleep, and at last to keep watch for God, and in turn to sleep to those deeds for which a mind dead to Christ stays awake. If God, by the light of his Word, does not open our understanding through the teaching of God, let us at least take examples from these very buildings, and let stones and timbers be teachers to the dull, so that the kind of work we have made here with our hands we may make by faith; though the work of the mind is far from the labour of the hands, yet from an unequal cause an equal reasoning of work is drawn; see, I shall prove it, how unlike forms come together in a like appearance. Many remember the places where the new roofs stand; for it is a short time since all were begun that now stand finished; sweated over for two years, the third year completed them by the prayer of the saints and the help of Christ. Part of the space was a small garden, part a heap of rubble, which joined hands, with the people taking care, removed, and dug out the cheap herbs of vegetables with the brambles, so that the area, purged, might lie open with a shining surface, which now shines far and wide, paved over an acre adorned with marble stones, forgetful of its former cultivation. How well it has changed its look! After the use of dung, the adornment of marble; after cheap cabbage it bears Parian shell-basins, and shines with waters where it shone with filth. In what way, then, will this building now give me a pattern by which I may cultivate, build and renew myself in my senses and set myself as a dwelling to be marked out for Christ?

The reasoning is ready: what my earth is, what is rubble in me, and whence thorns are born in my field. The heart is earth; the faults of a depraved heart are rubble; idle luxury, impure love, stained lust are the rubble of the soul; so anxious care for the body, gnawing envy and greedy hunger, heavy anger, light hope, ambition prodigal of its own and thirsty for another's, are thorns to the mind, because they always torment wavering souls with empty goads, souls continually burned by wretched fear of want and wretched ardour of having. And so, amid riches, they thirst, needy, like that Tantalus amid the waters, and do not have what they seem to have. For they fear to use what they have gained, they leave what they have kept, and while they prepare the means of living, they lose the time of living. These thorns, then, this rubble must be cleared from bristling minds, and this first root of all crimes, from which the unhappy tree sprouts, must be plucked from our fibres; let it fall, struck at the root by the Lord's axe, so that it may never sprout in our fields. If this root, its fuel cut off from us, dries up, every wickedness will fall, every vice will perish, and all evils will follow the fall of their mother, and as their tree dies the fruits will perish with it. Then, the garden well purged, the house will be built, and, founded on living soil, the structure of divine effort will rise well on high. Christ himself will raise columns in us and dissolve the old pillars of the obstructed soul, and the King will make space for himself in our senses, to walk about in them, as in Solomon's five porticoes Wisdom used to lead healing steps with godly mouth, healing bodies by touch and hearts by teaching. So let us not be old among new roofs, so that Christ, who dwells in the heart, may revisit new hearts. For a worse tear results when new and old are forced together, and new wine is well put into new wineskins. Let the former life perish, lest the future life perish. Let us leave the world willingly, which we must lose unwillingly unless we flee it willingly; let us die, that we may not die; let us cover a deadly life with a life-giving death. Let the earthly image perish, let the heavenly come in, and let Adam be turned into Christ; let us be changed here too, that we may be changed there; whoever now remains in himself the same will not be changed from himself for eternity either.

Make spring with songs; let my articulate voice flow in modest measures. Be present, Felix, my rich cause for speaking, and glide into my heart with silent breath. Your spirit will run through my mouth. Be the fountain of my eloquence; I shall be the pipe for your streams, which you supply to me from the river of the divine Word. Rise, then, and enter my breast with gentle breath, O Felix, father and lord and patron, you, Felix, my house and medicine and wisdom; now sharpen my mind, dulled through long leisure, quickening my heart with fiery light. But my speech is not to be poured out on this sea, to run through the merits or miracles of the saints, and to try to set out in verse what God grants and does through all the saints from the origin of things, which neither the human mind grasps nor the tongue can utter. And what wonder in this, if a sheet in a whole volume cannot contain what the whole world does not contain? For the sower of the world is greater than the world, God the King himself, who fills earth and heaven; him whom this world does not contain, the saints contain, not by amplitude of body, but, humble in piety, capacious with a pure heart. So now, that I may tell the divine good deeds of my patron Felix, either the benefits of life he has conferred on me, or those which, excelling with heavenly help, he does not cease to confer as gifts on the godly almost every day, bestowing godly gifts with various signs, the order of his merits demands that Christ be praised; I shall seem to praise not a man but rather him by whose authority Felix, mighty, holds a venerable name and gives healing riches, by which he visits sick bodies and frees souls captive to the power of the black demon, God overcoming. Nor in this help alone does bountiful Felix perform the gifts of Christ and triumph most mightily over the viperous enemy.

The sanctuary of Felix, venerable with ancient worship, now opens a new light in widened spaces. You who remember the narrow throne, rejoice to see how this throne shines to the praise of the patron. Before, the place was small, narrow for performing the sacred rites, and refusing suppliants room to spread their hands; now it offers the people spacious altars for the sacred services, in the bosom of the martyr in the middle. All things renewed please God; Christ always renews all things and enlarges them to a fullness of light. So, honouring also the throne of beloved Felix, he has advanced it in splendour and in space at once.

Before, the boy was Celsus through his famous fathers and ancestral name, but now he lives lofty by merit, whom the Lord Christ has heaped with so great a gift that he went, unformed in years and new, to the waters, and grace, doubled for God, advanced him, twice an infant, by span of age and by the font of washing. Alas, what shall I do? Hanging in doubtful affection, I struggle: shall I congratulate or grieve? The boy is worthy of both; love urges tears on me and love urges joys, but faith bids rejoice, affection bids weep. I lament that so little fruit was given to his fathers from so sweet a pledge in so slight a time. Again, as I turn over the everlasting goods of eternal life, which God prepares in heaven for the innocent, I rejoice that he died, having finished mortal things in a short age, so that he might quickly enjoy divine riches, nor, mingled long with the wicked, draw earthly contagions in the fragile lodging of the body, but, defiled by no crime of this world, might go more worthily to the eternal Lord. So the infant was owed to God rather than to us, and indeed, for our sake too, he pleased God. The little one had begun to draw out his eighth year, driving his first times in swift courses. Already he bore the boyish yoke on his tender neck, subject to the hard commands of a grammarian, and what the boy was taught, as his teacher marvelled, the noble boy drank in with teachable talent. His parents rejoiced, with foreboding, trembling hearts, while they feared envy of so great a gift.

Nor was there long delay; God, Christ, summoning from heaven the pleasing soul, took it up with deserved honour and snatched him suddenly from earth, because he was worthier to live joined to the godly assemblies. The cause of death was a moisture spread in his throat, by which a heavy swelling puffed up his milky neck; then, repressed, it went away, but, slipping to the inmost parts, it fled into the body and drove life from the vitals. The earth received its part, the flesh being buried; the spirit went away, carried in an angelic bosom. The bereft parents led an empty funeral; Celsus lives glad in a lofty grove. Refrain, I pray, godly parents, from sinning with many tears, lest affection come into fault. For it is impious affection to mourn a blessed soul, and a harmful love to weep for one rejoicing in God. Is it not plain how much sin is drawn on by such affection? We are accused of holding faith deceitfully, or of rejecting God's laws by rebellious error, unless what pleased the Lord pleases us. It is more just to mourn those human darknesses which we, degenerate, make for our souls, forgetful of the first origin of the heavenly image, which the Father, pitying, calls back to his kingdom. For love of it the Son took up my limbs, conceived of a virgin, born a man of a virgin, bearing all things of men, and in one body all men, the Lord of all taking them up as servant. For he was made in the form of a servant, he who was highest, God reigning in the form of God with the Father King. He took up the form of a servant and destroyed the guilt by which man was once a slave of punishment and death.

And our flesh, made Lord in the image of a servant, restored the servant to freedom, so that the heavenly image might return to me through Christ, who on the cross stripped off the earthly Adam. So my Creator bore my flesh and my death and redeemed his dear work by death. He had given me many things before, promises of salvation and precepts by which I might be directed through good things. But because, though the medicine of the law was applied, I had not washed away the inveterate wounds of the first father, nor had I believed, though prophets were sent ahead from the divine mouth, that I should wait for the gifts of God, and despaired salvation had plunged the human race everywhere into darkness without the light of faith, and sin reigned at the same time in our body, death in sin, the demon in destruction, and sad fear and wretched error were driving captive man headlong more deeply into death: meanwhile the Father himself, from high heaven, pitying the pestilent falls of erring men, and the serpent ruling in the savage death of the fallen, did not bear it, and sent his Son for every good. He obeyed willingly, God in harmony with the Father in all things, caring for their common cause with equal kindness. He came and became man, and, perfect, mingled of both, showed that God was in the frail flesh. He uses the services of a man, but also shows forth signs of the God hidden within by healing commands. He teaches divine things with a human voice, and performs mortal things in the body, but apart from sin. For, caring only to restore to himself the substance of his own work, he came to take nature, not vice.

For the good one made man good in nature for good things; man, fallen by his own mind, corrupted himself. Therefore the maker of men came in a mortal body, not made man with mortal crime as well. For he would not destroy faults unless free of them, nor could he release the guilty if himself guilty, nor would death have yielded to a sinner, since it would lawfully hold one bound by the chains of sin. So it rightly yielded to Christ as he broke open hell, in whom it had nothing it could bind. And death itself, made guilty in turn of an unjust judgment, was subdued by right to man, slain through crime. The serpent grew pale with envy, seeing the infernal bars opened, the law reversed, as man was led back, and the mortal in turn released from the bonds of death, and the body shaken out of its earth to rise, and moreover seeing it, alive again, climb the heavens, he gnashed in vain, livid, with savage tooth. And now he wastes away, as with the growing ranks of the godly the destroyer himself perishes through Christ. So he healed the vices of my soul and took on the weaknesses of my body, man from a mother, God from a Father. Weak indeed, but natural, were the things of the flesh he bore, and he showed the affections of the body. With human senses he eats and drinks, and lowers his eyes in sleep, and tires on the road by walking. As man he sheds tears for a dead friend, whom soon, as God himself, he raises from the tomb. As man he is carried in a boat, and as God he commands the winds, and by the power of God the man walks on the sea. With the mind of man he trembles at the hour of approaching death; with the mind of God he knows the time of death is at hand.

As man he is fixed on the cross; as God he terrified the world from the cross. As man he suffers death, but death itself suffers God. As man he hangs on the cross; as God he forgives crimes from the cross, and dying he kills the life of crime; and, reckoned among the guilty and thought worse than the robber whom Judea preferred to the godly Lord, he gives the heavenly kingdom to the believing robber, and, still shut in the earth, already opens paradise. So it befits us to strengthen our souls, to raise our minds, and to thrust idle fears from the heart, we for whom, behold, that Son of God laid down his life and took it up again, remaining God throughout. God the victor celebrated a triumph over our death and carried our body with him to the stars, not content that he drank all mortal things for us, to take away our wounds by his own. But lest the anxious care of a doubtful mind should keep me in suspense, he rose in the body in which he fell. Clear proof lay open to mortal eyes; he himself was seen after death as he was before death. For he offered himself of his own accord to the doubting disciples and gave himself to be examined by eyes and hands. Nor did the apostle once doubt without the purpose of God, so that no one might doubt that he lives after death. He strengthened faith by doubting; while Thomas, hesitant, is reproved face to face, every man is instructed. What Thomas is bidden to see and touch in person, I learn to believe steadfastly with firm faith: that the death of men has been subdued by the death of Christ crucified, and the hope of rising again placed in bodies, in our bodies, because Christ rose victorious in this flesh which I bear, in which I die.

And, teaching me, for my sake he presents his limbs to the doubters and proves his solid flesh through its structure of bones, and moreover shows the wounds of side and hands and bids the doubter put his fingers into them. “See,” he says, “behold my side, and hands and feet; behold the nails of the cross, behold the path of the spear. Behold, it is plain that the very framework of the whole body stands alive in sinews, bones, face and skin. So hold the faith which you see and, moreover, which you touch, and drive doubtful thoughts from your heart, and be witnesses to all of so great a salvation, and free the hearts of all men from fear. Let the fear of death perish for all, and let this hope of rising again animate all peoples together. Yet this is the salvation of believers, who with faithful heart will receive what you behold with your eyes. Behold, in me, with no distinction among all men, death has been overcome and has gone; salvation stands revived. I gave life from death, I subdued death by dying, and restored the human race with my blood; overcoming the sin of the flesh in the flesh, I destroyed the material of guilt and brought forth justice. In the body death fell, in the body life rose; in the flesh by which he had died before, man has come alive again. And now, behold, carrying Adam alive again in my body, I display him as victor over death and the serpent.” What consolations, I ask, will suffice us, or what rest will heal souls now weary, if not even so great a medicine can heal the sick, which teaches that lives return when death has died?

Grief, depart; fear, go away; guilt, flee. Death falls, life has risen, Christ calls to the stars, having undergone my death, dead for me and victor for me, so that the death of sin may be for me the life of God. In short, he led the robber, saved now from the cross, by an open path to where paradise is, and by this gift gave a sign both of expiating sins and of overcoming by faith the hedges of the forbidden grove. With such examples, with so great a guarantor of salvation, it befits us, raised up, to turn sad things into glad. Let us drive away complaining griefs with an ungrateful heart, and let pure light return to our eyes when they are wiped. Let us believe Christ that, as we have seen in him, we rise in the same bodies in which we die, and then, the garment of divine beauty poured over us, changed, we put on the angelic appearance. But if so great a night stands in the way of darkened minds, and the sluggish sense grows dull in a blunted body, so that, because divine things are hidden from bodily eyes, you say that the Scriptures hold no credibility: let Paul teach that eternal things are not seen, that eternal things are hidden from human eyes. Fool, see earthly things, believe heavenly things; look at the world with the eye, at God with the mind. Hence faith is precious; for just as grace will no longer be grace if it is attributed to merits, so there is no faith except that which believes what it does not see and follows an eternal thing with hope as guide. Wretched mortals, complaining race, at last strip off impious hearts with softened minds. Alas, how long, I pray, with heavy heart do you seek lies and love the slippery things of vanity?

Change your ways, break the bonds of death, and give your free necks to the very sweet yoke. Take divine chains in exchange for liberty, which release from crime and bind with piety. You who follow darkness wander in the open light, and you who see in the night act blind in the light. So let us unlock the eyes and ears of the mind to Christ, so that the mind, shut to sin, may be open to God. For God already reveals his promises to bodily sight too and shows hidden things through clear ones. All things rehearse the likeness of rising again in every body, both seeds on earth and stars in the sky. Nights and days, risings and settings, alternate in turn; I die at night, I rise in the day. I sleep, lulled in the bodily image of death; I am roused from sleep as from destruction. What of seeds, what of the leaves of the groves, what of the seasons? Surely by these laws all things pass away and return. In rising spring a new appearance returns to all things, brought to life after the death of winter. What man will do once, to whom the bodies of the world are subject, all things under heaven do often. But they ask with what body every dead man is restored, or in what way a man is made from ash. If the things recorded by the sacred prophets are not enough, dumb things cry out faith; believe what is visible. See that no seeds emerge in their fields unless they first perish, dissolved by rotting decay. You sow naked, you gather clothed; you cast dry grains and reap the same multiplied in fruit. O perverse faith and distrust in us, that we trust the earth and doubt God!

And certainly the earth neither dared nor was able to promise me anything; indeed the field has often deceived me, barely returning the seed entrusted to it; nor yet, though deceived, do I hesitate to entrust it with the hope of a crop, nor does it irk me to sweat at sure labour for uncertain fruits and to entrust bare seeds to bare soil. But if the earth can give back corrupted seed, which yet it does by the law of the eternal Lord, is it believed that it will be a hard work for the Almighty to restore from something us who were made from nothing? I was nothing, and by God's making I was born to be; now I shall be again from my own seed. For though even the bones be reduced to fine ash, the dust holds the seeds of the whole body, and even when the earth has sucked up the ashes from emptied tombs, mixed with kindred turf, then also the Almighty holds whole those who seem to have vanished from the bodily eyes of men, and on the great day we shall see the bodies we now think consumed rise whole for God, for whom no nature perishes, because whatever is anywhere is all enclosed in the Creator's bosom. Those whom water has swallowed in rivers and sea and fish, those whom birds and beasts have torn apart, the earth owes all to God, because those whom water has drowned the ground has received, laid on shore or seabed; the earth, though one, yet not received in one tomb, covers the bones of a torn body scattered in places; and because consumed and consumer alike fall in the one bosom of the earth as death brings them, or through the excretion by which animals purge themselves they give back devoured limbs in digested food, the human body is poured over from another's body and does not lose the force of its own kind.

But though the limbs of men, passed into the ground from the limbs of beasts, remain safe by a living seed, when the beast dies, for which a human corpse may have been food, the account is divided. For man is a rational animal, and therefore in him the king excels the other bodies in body, so that, although he may be given as prey to dumb animals, he refuses to be joined with them in lot. Only the flesh which was the vessel of a rational soul will receive the vigour of rising again, so that, its frame restored, it may receive the soul returned to earth in a covering that will no longer fall, and as here mind and flesh are joined in every act, so they may be associated for the eternal day, so that they may gather the rewards of their deeds with shared fruit, partners in merit, in the light or the fire of their place. Therefore, although we and all breathing things have received one matter in body, yet we, released by death, are not called back into emptiness, without share of soul, from the setting of the flesh; but when the trumpet sounds, the lands on every side giving back our bodies from hidden seeds, with body, mind and soul knit again in their covenants, we are set whole before God the Lord. If you doubt that ashes can be gathered again into bodies and souls brought back into their vessels, Ezekiel will be your witness, to whom long ago the whole appearance of rising again was revealed by the Lord.

There you will see coming alive in the whole plain the dry remains of ancient men, and bones scattered widely through the extended field running of their own accord, as bidden, to their joints, and putting forth sinews from their marrowy inner parts, and soon drawing skin over the flesh grown upon them, and, quicker than a word, the limbs completed in order, new men standing from old dust. And lest perhaps you think what the manifest vision of the holy prophet brings to be the vain dreams of a sleeper, take a greater and full witness besides; for the Lord of the prophets himself speaks: “I am the life; whoever believes in me, not destroyed by death, will live blessed in light shared with me.” In short, what he said in word he proved by power, himself calling back his own man from the abysses, although at that time Christ gave signs not only in his own body, when he died, victor, on the cross. For as he opened hell, the earth shaken, and released Adam bound in the infernal prison, the buried, rising, burst the split rocks, and a new dome flowered in the holy city. Many saw the bodies of the ancient godly renewed, brought to life by the descent of God. Then also the world, blinded as the light fled, feared to expiate the crime with eternal night. Then too the altars, laid bare as the veil was torn, lost the sanctity of the sacred shrine, so that it might be shown that the temple was to be emptied of divinity and its holy things profaned by an enemy hand, as the great outcome later taught under a Roman leader, when the citizens were overthrown with the temple and the sacred things with the city.

For it was right that Judea, for which Christ was not its sacrifice and through which Christ was made a victim, bereft at once of the seat and place of its ancient rites, having denied faith, should lose everything sacred. For Christ is the end of the law, because, foretold by the faithful law, he was by his coming the law to the law, prescribing an end to the old and a law of faith, establishing for the nations the law of the prophets. Hence the teacher says: the old things have flowed away, their times completed; all things everywhere come forth new. And now with unveiled face we behold God openly in Christ in the honour of his own light. And I think that the mysteries of the veil torn in the temple signified this too, which grace bestows. For as the sanctuary lay open when the veil was torn, so faith unlocks for us the hidden things of the law. Hence Moses is read under the ancient veil by the Jews, still covered with a cloud of the heart, which Christ, believed by me, takes from the eyes of my mind, scattering the shadowed appearances, and teaching that he was veiled in the ancient shadow of the law and is now revealed in the face of a body, such as the prophets sent before sang would come, such as appeared before the apostles' eyes, such as the Jews did not perceive though they saw, their minds blunted by their own impiety, and such as, though not seen by us in the body, we behold by believing with inner light. For what the truthful teachers teach that they saw and touched, I touch and see by faith.

And by believing it lies open to all to know Christ, who blinds the impious hearts of faithlessness and pours his light through faithful hearts, that he may dwell in pleasing souls and glorify them. So, my brothers, my care, my heart, in this faith gladden your sorrowing souls. Drive away sadness, teachable in faithful piety, and, trusting God, put on joy. Unhappy mourning and mad grief befit those for whom no hope remains, because no faith, and for whom all good is only to live in this age, to despair of God, to trust in bodily things. Let an inner stupor besiege the inconsolable breast of those deserted by true understanding, whom a mind faithless to God disowns, and for whom a lot without share in Christ falls into infernal darkness. For us let the apostle be present as consoler with the mouth of God, let loving Christ teach us by the gospel; let the examples of the fathers and the proclamations of the prophets, let the book of apostolic history strengthen us, in which we see Christ return bodily to the stars and be carried to heaven in the bosom of a cloud, and we are bidden to hope for him to return from the heavens such as we saw him go to the Father in heaven. On his coming all things now hang, all hope and faith gape toward this King. And now the ages, to be changed for new ones, are in labour with the end approaching in the last time. The true oracles in the sacred books warn all to believe what was foretold and to prepare themselves for God. Hasten, I pray, while the opportunity lies open here, to provide good things and to guard against evils beforehand.

Turn away your perverse cares with a converted heart; faith shows how to weep with useful tears. It is good to mourn sin and to wash away with poured tears the wounds contracted by faults, tears with which that David, groaning much, mighty with humble heart, watered his bed every night. If he, beloved of God, ate ashes like bread and mixed his cups with tears, what, alas, befits wretched me to do? Whence shall I be expiated? Whence shall I make satisfaction? By what help shall I be saved? My pumice heart lacks tears, ashes revolt me as food, and delicacies please my hungry soul. Who would supply me a fountain for rivers of tears, with which I might weep for my deeds and my days? For, according to the deserts of a life spent in crimes, I need to weep for huge wounds with a river. Break the stone of my heart, Saviour Jesus, so that my softened inmost parts may flow with a godly fountain; you, I pray, O Christ the fountain, be born in my fibres, so that the living vein of your water may spring up in me. For you are the fountain from which life flows, from which grace streams, from which light is poured on peoples of every kind. Those who drink you, Christ, refreshed by the sweet torrent, will thirst no more, and yet they will thirst. For those whom the abundance of the divine Word has satisfied, its sweetness, once drunk, makes thirst the more. So, Lord, God, let souls always hunger and thirst for you, the bread and fountain of salvation. Neither fasting hunger nor dry thirst will consume life if the mind eats and drinks you. Ever-flowing, you are always drunk, and, though drained, more generous, you surpass the crowd and the thirst of the drinkers.

For you are wholly sweetness, God, love, Christ; hence you can fill rather than satiate. And, always to be thirsted for with greedy desires, you flow in and are received, nor is love sated, and so piety is made perfect, that you may be loved without end, Christ, by your own, to whom you will give life without end. Grant me now to mourn, God, and with saving weeping to sow beforehand the seeds of eternal joy; let this mourning, I pray, rather remain for me in the age in which whatever is present passes by a short road. Go far off, you glad; I prefer the company of those who weep, so that with brief tears I may reap long joys. If now heavy sackcloth with its rough covering of goats' bristles covers and goads me as I mourn, then, the Father appeased, the ring of deserved honour will be returned, and the robe of joy will gird me; then rightly the Father will kill the fatted calf for me, if only, fasting, I hunger for justice. I would rather endure hunger for bread than for the holy Word; I do not want the house of wine, I thirst for the water of light; here let dire hunger torment me, here foul poverty besiege me, shrunk in sad rags, here let the rich man pass me by before his house, scorning to fill me even with his crumbs. I do not want a silken garment to glow on me with Tyrian purple, to the envy of a body that will burn, lest after purple robes the everlasting flame surround me and I pay for my garment in fire. Here rather let us lie wretched on a foul heap of dung, and let dogs lick our sores, so that, released after a sad life by a calm death, a gentle angel may receive us as we meet him and set us down rejoicing in the bosoms of the patriarchs, far from where Gehenna rages with gaping chasm.

I do not speak fictions that terrify little children: the dog barking at the gates through three mouths, and Charon terrifying shades with sad squalor, the Eumenides savage with viper hair, Tityos, the eternal food of the deadly vulture, and Tantalus parched with thirst amid the waters, the wheel turning without end and the rolling stone, and the vain jars of the sweating Danaids. These things poets empty of truth sang with vain words, who did not hold Christ, the head of truth. But God has taught us true things, the sower of his own works himself recounting to us all the truth of them. Learn from the gospel the places of the poor man and of the rich: the poor man lies in Abraham, the rich in fire. With justice reversing their lots, he who had wept here rejoices there, and the rich man is in want while the poor is full. The one enjoys good rest, the other groans in fires; the rich man receives punishment for his wealth, the poor man riches. The rich man begs a little dew from the poor man, whom he had scorned when he begged in the world above. Hence not even a small drop of refreshment trickled on him, burning, from the tip of the poor man's finger, since from his great feasts not even a crumb had fallen into the mouth of the hungry poor man. By these warnings let us learn to live holy justice for Christ and to set aside a share for the poor. You, to whom the needy man is filthy, who shudder at the sight of the poor and hold meeting a godly suppliant to be an ill omen, who admire yourself shining in a precious garment and do not see that you are filthy in your inner dress, you carry in your mind all that you shudder at in the poor man's body, a rich man filthier than rags and sores;

you despise the blind, you avoid touching the leper, greedy rich man, you yourself love your own leprosy. He is wretched and weak in the eyes of men; but you are foul before God by weakness of soul. Shameless one, you spurn the needy man, your partner in nature, and by avarice deprive him of his share. Whatever overflows for you, unjust one, with no use, which you hide in dug turf, is the share of the poor. Why do you hold what belongs to others? With what hope do you keep what must be left, neither returned to its owners nor to be enjoyed by you? You, to whom the needy man is filthy, who, senseless in the name of a rich man, raise a sad eyebrow with wrinkled brow, and do not deign even to call them men whom you do not see flowing with like luxury, look in what form that Son of God came, who, though he was rich, was poor in the world. And coming, God chose not the lofty but the cheap things of the world, to destroy the strong by the weak. Let not the rich now rejoice in riches, nor the strong in strength, nor the wise in great talent. Let no one trust in his own resources or applaud himself, since all things are sown or given from God as fountain. Christ, made the refuge and the person of the needy, is shame to the rich, glory to the poor. Let us run eagerly toward his ambrosial fragrance, that the odour of death may flee far from us. Who will grant me to pour precious nard from alabaster and to wash the Lord's sacred feet with weeping? You, I pray, my care, give your effort to godly cares, and give yourselves to God, the immense spouse, with united mind. The time is here, the Lord is now near; hasten to be prepared to meet the King while the short hour lies open.

Use your riches with kindly piety, and pluck the root of evil from your hearts. Store the price of your life in the hearts of the poor, and anoint your heads with godly expenditure. And, kissing the chaste footprints of the Lord Christ, wipe them, both of you, with your hair, wash them with your eyes. If you desire to enjoy Celsus without end, act so that the same hall may lie open to you. For him whom holy faith, an age not knowing crime, and a godly mind contained in a chaste body, it is sure faith that he possesses that region above, where the fiery altar of God protects the saints. So we do not want you, good brothers, to grieve over our pledge like men without hope; for if we surely believe that Christ Jesus died and now lives in the citadel of God, so also the Father will bring with Christ when he returns those who rest in living faith. For this that teacher teaches in the word of the Lord, with whom as guide we strive to go the starry ways: that for those whose life was spent in Christ, there will be everlasting life with Christ. And when the chief angel has sounded with the trumpet the sign of the Lord's coming from the lofty seat of the Father, those who died in Christ will rise first, deemed worthy to go on the clouds to meet God. And when all live again in the flesh in which they lived, not all will become light, their bodies changed. For we shall all rise, but we shall not all be changed; this will be the distinction among the nations before God. The bodies of the profane too will rise incorruptible from the tombs, food for long punishment.

For them life will be to die without end, and death to live in punishments, and to feed their tortures with enduring flesh. The sinner himself will beget his own executioners from his own body and will be food for his own worms. But those whom piety has lifted by heavenly conduct will wear shared crowns with God as King, and, their body clothed with divine light, will live always conformed to Christ the Lord. Since this is so, take consolation from these words, and restore your souls, faithful to the true hope; and believe that Celsus, our common pledge, in the light above enjoys the milk and honeycombs of the living. Either kindly Abraham cherishes him, received in his bosom, and gentle Lazarus feeds him with the dew of his finger, or, with the infants of Bethlehem in paradise, whom wicked Herod struck in envy, he plays in a fragrant grove and weaves crowns, rewards for the martyrs to be honoured. Mingled with such, the infant will accompany the Lamb, the King, added to the virgin ranks. Celsus, boy dwelling in the chaste land of the blessed, Celsus, grief of your fathers, glory, Celsus, of your fathers, Celsus, love and longing and light of your own, Celsus, a grace brief for us, long for you. But yet your grace will be able to live long for us too, if you remember us before the Lord. For in you, of short age but great merits, life was short in time but mighty in piety. For of such infants the kingdom of heaven is proved to be, such as you were, a boy in age, mind and faith, and such as was ours too, he of your blessed name, called away at the time he was given, offspring long desired and not granted to us, unworthy to rejoice in godly posterity;

we believe that he, Celsus, plays with you, sharer of joy and life, in the eternal green places, he whom we entrusted, in the city of Complutum, to the neighbouring martyrs, joined to them by the covenant of a tomb, so that from the nearby blood of the saints he may draw that with which to sprinkle our souls in that fire. For perhaps for us sinners too, one day, this little drop of our blood will be a light. Celsus, help your brother, labouring with shared piety, that we may have a place in your rest. Live as partners, live eternally, brothers, and inhabit the glad places, a worthy pair, and, equal infants, overcome the sins of your parents by innocent merits and chaste intercessions. As many years as you, Celsus, had, so many days of life did he draw; but he, the younger, is the elder in being first. For he is younger in that he lived less; but yet the same, in that he departed first, is now your elder there. Celsus, with your brother, stand by your own, to whom we are added; for we are a vein of your father's blood. Together with your father Pneumatius and your mother Fidelis, name also Paulinus and Therasia as your own, so that by your prayers, as Christ pities, we too, Celsus, may have with your own a common protection. But yet it remains for us to give effort, so that we may follow you with like simplicity. Then we shall be able to live as companions of our Celsus, and to be eternally fathers of a sweet pledge.

I have examined, I confess, all the sects, I, Antonius; I have sought very many things, I have run through each one, but I have found nothing better than to believe in Christ. These things I have resolved to describe in gentle verse; and lest it displease that I compose such songs, David himself entreated God with melodious voice, and by his example we shall sing small things instead of great, telling what is to be fled, what followed, what worshipped, so that in all things both the matter and the reason may be proved. First, not even the wondrous grace of God moved the Jewish people; for then, snatched from wicked Pharaoh, and having crossed the sea on foot with the shining column, with a leader who saw the hostile horsemen drowned, a people which never lacked anything in the desert fields, for whom manna ran from heaven and a spring from the rock, after this it denied the God who granted such great things, and while with mad heart it sought another deity, it destroyed in kindled fires the gold that it brought. The pagan, too, is like it; he adores the stones he carves and makes for himself what he himself must fear. Then he worships images which he so shapes from bronze that, when it pleases him, he sends them broken to the mint, or rather often turns them into shameful forms. Hence he slaughters wretched cattle and seeks in the hot lung the minds of the gods whom he thinks angry, and prays for the life of a man from the death of a beast. What pardon does he ask to be forgiven, who demands it with blood? For what a thing is that, how foolish or how remarkable! Though almighty God once formed man, man dares to form God; and lest crimes be lacking, he even sells him, and the buyer purchases a lord for himself.

Should I believe that philosophers have anything of reason, who lack reason, whose wisdom is vain? There are Cynics, like dogs, as they betray by their name; there are also followers of the uncertain doctrine of Plato, whom the long-sought substance of the soul troubles, always discussing it and never able to define it; hence they love to copy out Plato's book on the soul, which contains nothing certain within except its title. There are also Physicists, called by the name of nature, whom an ancient, rude and uncultivated life delights. For one of them once, carrying a staff and an earthen vessel, which alone he thought useful and alone to be kept, the one for support, the other for drinking, when he had seen a farmer stand and with upturned hands draw water to drink, broke the earthen vessel, and, throwing it far away, said that superfluous things must be removed. A rustic taught him that he could scorn even this. These neither drink wine nor are nourished by bread, nor lie on a bed nor keep off the cold with clothes, and, ungrateful to God, they refuse what he has granted. What shall I say of the various rites, and the temples founded to gods and goddesses? I shall say first what the Capitol is: here is a god and the god's wife, and they will have her to be his sister too, whom Virgil, their authority, marks by saying “both sister and wife.” More is told of Jupiter: that he violated his own daughter and gave her to his brother, and, to seize other women, changed his own shape: now he was a serpent, now a bull, now a swan and a tree, and by changing himself he shows what he was; another's form pleased him more than his own. More shamefully than these he feigned an eagle and came into the unspeakable embraces of a boy. What does the crowd of worshippers say?

Let them either deny that he is Jupiter or confess that disgrace. He certainly holds a name that cannot be proved by reason. They sacrifice to Jupiter and say “Jupiter, best,” and pray to him, and put “Father Janus” in the first rank. This Janus was a king who made the Janiculum by his own name, a prudent man, who, since many future things … he could look back on, they painted him with a double face, and the old Latins called him twin Janus. Because he came by ship to the Ausonian shores, a coin was first struck in his honour in such a way that one side carried a head, the other a ship; remembering this, whatever coins they mark, from the ancient deed they call them “heads” and “ships.” What do they hope from Jupiter, who is second to a king, and who is placed after him in sacrifices by the mouths of those who pray? He also has a mother captured by love of a shepherd; for the shepherd is earlier than Jupiter or Jove himself; but the shepherd was better, who wished to keep his chaste modesty and spurned the goddess, who savagely cut off his manly parts, so that he might never touch another's bed, he who would not approach hers. Was this, was this what the just sentence of the gods did, that he who did not become an adulterer should not become a husband? Now too half-men lament the shameful mysteries, nor are men lacking whom this contagion turns, and within they adore some secret thing as greater and call it holy, and if a chaste man wishes to go there, he will be profane. So the priest himself, more strictly, avoids intercourse with women and submits to that with men. O blind mind of men! The stage always raises laughter at their rites, nor do they withdraw from this error.

They say Saturn is Jupiter's father and that he devoured his children before, and soon vomited the unspeakable feast from his belly, but afterward, by his wife's art, sank into his belly a stone substituted for Jupiter, and had he not done so, Jupiter would have been consumed. And they call him Cronos and, by a fiction, Chronos, because time consumes what it creates and promises again what it has consumed. Why, though, do they obliquely invent a name for time? They say too that he, because he often feared for himself from his offspring, cast down from heaven by Jupiter, hid through the fields of Italy, and that for this reason it was then called Latium. Great gods both! One is hidden in the lands, the other could not know the hiding places of the lands. Hence the ancient Quirites established the evil of the Latiar, so that a slaughtered man might satisfy an empty name. What night of the mind, what improvident hearts! What is worshipped is nothing, and bloody rites are performed. What of the fact that they hide the Unconquered in dark caves, and dare to call him whom they cover in darkness the Sun? Who would worship light in secret and hide the star above in the underworld, except the cause of evils? What of the fact that the rites of Isis do not hide the sistrum and the dog's head, but set them in public places? They certainly seek something and rejoice when it is found, and lose again what they may seek again. What wise man would bear this: those, as it were, shutting up the sun, these bringing out openly the monsters of their own gods? What has Serapis deserved, who is so torn apart by them through various and shameful places? In short, he always becomes a beast and a dog, becomes the rotting corpse of a little ass, becomes a man now in rags, now languid with a sick body. While they do such things, they confess that he feels nothing.

Why should I speak of Vesta, of whom the priest himself denies he knows what she is? And yet in the deepest inner recesses an ever-unextinguished fire is pretended to be kept. Why is she a goddess, not a god? Why is fire said to be female? This woman, indeed, as Hyginus records, was the first long ago to weave a garment with new thread, called after her own name, which she herself handed over to Vulcan, who had then shown her how to guard covered hearths; he in turn, glad of the gift, offered it to the Sun, through whom he had earlier detected the adultery of Mars; now the whole credulous crowd hang garments for the Sun during the Vulcanalia. And to mark Venus, Adonis too is then carried; then they throw dung, they throw him himself as dung. If you inquire into everything, things seem still more laughable. Another thing is added here: I hear that those whom they call Vestal virgins carry five-yearly feasts to a serpent, who either does not exist or, if he exists, is the devil himself, formerly the counsellor against the human race; and they venerate him who now, in the name of Christ, both trembles and hangs and confesses all his deeds. What a mind men have, to speak false things instead of true, who worship what should be left and leave what should be worshipped! Now it will be enough for us to tell of vain fears. All these things I did before I gained the clear light, and when I was long uncertain and driven by so many storms, holy church received me in the harbour of salvation and, after the wandering waves, placed me in a tranquil seat, so that, the cloud of evils wiped away, I may now hope for serene light in the promised time. Now that first salvation which forgetful Adam lost, then at the persuasion of an evil wind, now, with Christ as oarsman, rescued from the rocks, will rise again to remain forever.

For our helmsman so governs all things everywhere that he who just now took error of mind from us opens the threshold of paradise by a better way. Happy is our faith, dedicated to the one and sure God. For God is one, one substance, the Son is one, one; in both there is one vigour, one power. For Christ, the Word of God, shone out from the Father's heart and always was; he, not as if born, but going forth from his mouth, removed that empty chaos and took away the shapeless gap of woven night and distributed sea, lands, air, sky in their places, and gave them twin light, the darkness driven off. But when all things were amazed to see the new sun rise, he increased these four beginnings with various things: men are added to the lands, stars to the sky, the bird hangs in the air, the fish swims in the liquid sea. So he adorned each element with its own forms; he knotted these, though different, and joined the separate, and separated the joined, which now cohere though divided. For Ocean encloses the land, the sea itself is enclosed, under the heavenly axis the air is enclosed in the middle. Even this heaven which we see lofty is below six others rising at equal distance, and after seven thrones, after so many heavenly kingdoms, all the rest, which rises above all beyond, which exceeds above, which stretches everywhere on high, which lies open without end, which no mind gathers, is the house of inaccessible light and the holy seat of mighty God, whence from afar he sees the subject things he made. All things stand so, while the Spirit encircles all things.

These likewise, whose use is granted us, which the lower sky embraces in a great circle, though all differ, are held in one peace; in short, they have one name: all are the world. The earlier Greeks also called this cosmos; hence, distinguishing what was so composed, each language called it cosmos from adornment, mundus from light. For where the sun shines, all this lay foul in shadow, and the example remains whenever night disfigures all things, and teaches from darkness what grace of light has been given. He who made so many good things, who has so worked everywhere, this is the Lord from the heart of God, this the Spirit of his mouth, the Word of the holy Father, the builder of such great things. Nor let the pagan praise himself if he avoids idols, or thinks it enough to believe in one divinity. Does he worship God who does not worship his Word, who does not venerate his Power with like honour? And whoever confesses God to be invisible and incomprehensible will find, if he reflects, that Christ too is the same, since no one can comprehend the Word, no one can see him; his works alone are seen. For the Son in the Father, the Father in the Son made all things, and whatever he gave by power he protects by kindness. So he was, is, and will be the true Saviour forever, who took away errors, who made true things to be seen, and, the Father appeased, gave back the perishing world. Nor is it wonderful if he rules all things who created all things, who gave the whole from nothing and drove back darkness from light and ordered day to succeed night, and, because he was in the flesh, forgives the sins of the flesh;

for he sees that the frail fall into easy slips, and, though he reproves, he will give one pardon to all; and I shall say a new thing, nor shall I regret having said it: he will be more kind than just. In short, if he wished to be just, no one would escape punishment, without crime; for the just condemns evil things, the kind forgives all. He does this so that the gifts of the life to come may be assured, and that indulgence may give back what guilt took away; if this were not granted to the people who ask, then almost no one would be free from every offence. Who could possess the promised light by deserving it? Then it will be granted to the glad to touch the kingdoms of heaven, then death itself will be able to die, when through all time there will be everlasting life, when in that blessed seat there is no place for sinning, where there is no desire. So great a glory remains kept for the faithful people. He has bestowed more than this, given this greater gift too: that the sinner who repents of his former fall he does not have counted in the number of the sinning crowd. For it is punishment enough for one to whom his own guilt is grief; fear is its own punishment; he who confesses he has deserved them suffers, as it were, the torments of guilt. What could be better or what more moderate? He judges, examines, chastises, spares, honours, he who conquers all things and is not conquered even by anger. That this will be so in the future we already see from the present; for when, threatening, he often gathers bristling clouds and with godly terror flashes with fire too ruddy, and thunders with sad rains and black clouds, every kind of creature fears destruction; but the living power ceases and calms both the sky and minds alike. This too he bids us hope then, he who now proves he can destroy all things but refuses to will to destroy. So salvation to be renewed is shown for the age to come, and the kindness of the eternal God will remain eternal.

O blessed man, whose iniquity is forgiven and whose sluggish delay in believing has not been imputed, on whom faith conferred life when his works were empty! See, this man, whom painting, beneath the gold of the lofty roof, represents with true wonders, Baebianus, famous with the proud name of the Verii and with consular blood, is himself the generous grace of mighty Christ. Before, this man, caught in mortal bonds, amid the riches of the world but poor toward God, had run through a flattering life with resources ready, forgetful of mortality. When he sees himself, a mortal, subdued by his end, with weary look he seeks the kind God, and at once, enlightened, he finds Christ; he prays for pardon, and as a suppliant reveres the feet of the priests, himself his own accuser, and, as he denies he is worthy, grace makes him worthy. And he vows his life, if any remains, to be blameless, and rejoices to die, if he should die reborn. The bishop believed his prayer and, girded, poured the pure stream over him as he thirsted for the rivers of life. When the bishop soon performed the godly rites in the usual order, he, partaking of the divine sacrament and fragrant with chrism, confesses that he is astonished by a wondrous majesty; but what fragrance, he asks, does he feel gliding into his breast, healing his fibres with very sweet nectar? Then his diligent wife teaches that the ointment breathes of … from the name of Christ, and the priest promises and urges him to ask for himself a long span of life. He, now wholly God's, replies: “This gift is enough for me, which I possess; now death is gain for me, and life is Christ!”

See grace given to the earth through eternal Christ! This is that happy robber, who at the very end, confessing Christ, earned the stars, guilty but faithful; this is the late hired labourer from the eleventh hour, who goes away given the full wage of the day. So when he shone, renewed by the sanctifying wave, he himself, his heavy limbs laid back on the soft cushions, addresses his like-minded wife with refreshed heart: “My life had begun to draw out nine lustra of age, and a year beyond, happy for me in a like-minded marriage, sweet in children, famous in honours; and now, washed of deadly dirt, by a holy end it passes over to the godly God.” At these words his diligent wife, with godly tears, begs that he pray to live still. Then he: “O woman, not knowing what you ask, do you know already whether I can live so godly as to remain unimpaired in so great a gift? And what good is a life in which salvation dies?” As he says this bravely, his eyes flashing grimly, and looking up at heaven in amazement, he says: “I see a flaming circuit of light, into which circle no woman comes.” O happy he, to whom it was given while still in the body to see the appearance of the eternal age, in which there is no need of marriages, and sex passes away in perpetual bodies! Again, as he said this, released as if by sudden death, he draws a bloodless stiffness through his outstretched limbs.

But his wife, trembling and terrified by such sights, falls into the likeness of death; now mute, she stretches trembling hands to his face and, intent on the limbs of the one lying there, hangs, paler herself, over her lifeless husband. The very delay urges belief in death; for twice the double day turned round its circle, twice was closed by evening, while the image of death deceived mortal eyes. But he, snatched through the clouds by angelic hands, had left the lodging of the body that he was to seek again, and then was beholding the secrets of the heavenly sky and the blessed seats, as God showed them, and his godly mind, deemed worthy by Christ, while he was wept for on earth, rejoiced among the stars, grieving only at this, that he feared he must still return. Sent down from his ecstasy he returns, to tell what he had seen and to strengthen the faith of those who doubt that the dead live. And as, returned to his limbs, he saw the face of his wife bent over him, he promised that he would tell something wonderful, and put off his account to the following daylight. So when the next day shone at its first rising, in the new morning the priest (for he happened to be present) performs the sacred rites, and as he carried out the solemnities with godly worship, Baebianus, looking up at heaven, spread his hands and, drawing his arms to himself, as if pressing with eager embrace some gifts sent from heaven, asks: “Are all these mine?” All were astonished at his words and ask what he sees, hidden from mortals. He says in Greek “All things well,” often recalling the patriarch Isaac, and, shuddering and revering, says, in Greek, “divine, sweet divine to behold,” and tells how an angel lifted him, carrying him through the void, how he saw many thousands mingled with angelic hosts and companies, and Christ reigning as God over all with the Father; he tells of the eternal city with jewelled gates, he tells of the heavenly grove of the paradise of the sky.

And among these words he put his right hand into the secret breast of his wife, saying: “We are both one and the same,” and, repeating this, so completing a calm end in holy order, he gave back his life with a word of the gospel. And now he enjoys God and keeps his care for his blessed wife, bound by eternal love; yet he has taken one son with him as comfort, a father impatient of lacking all his offspring. But after you have closed your times with a full age, famous mother, your children brought up, then that boy of yours, endowed with a crown flowering with light, will run to meet you with his father; and your husband, coming glad from heaven with him as companion, will stretch out his right hand to you with kind words: “The time is here! Be released now from cares, released from limbs! You have lived for your children; now be given back to me. Now ours is not a mortal marriage, such as envious brevity gave before in sickly bodies, which the swift years took from us with slender fruit, adding barely two lustra to three years; for your life had heaped twenty years on one lustrum when my life went before your course, but my age had flowed twice ten years beyond yours, yet one love had made us equal in age. Now, firm in a better yoke and on the lips of the godly, we shall live golden ages with God as King. Rise, following husband and son; see, the gate of the serene sky lies open to merit … … … an angel flying ahead; God himself puts forth a godly hand from the cloud and calls you to heaven with his summoning right hand.” Happy Apra, to whom it was granted on earth and in heaven to hold the lasting good of a husband, wife of one man, by whom, as there was bright honour for you on earth, under the same name there will also be everlasting glory in heaven!