To the Martyrs 3

Granted now, blessed ones, that prison is irksome even to Christians. We were called to the military service of the living God already at the moment when we answered in the words of the oath. No soldier comes to war with luxuries, nor goes from his bedroom to the battle line, but from light tents, pitched and girt up, where every hardship, discomfort, and unpleasantness is found. Even in peace they learn beforehand to endure war by toil and hardships: marching in arms, running over the field, digging the ditch, forming the tortoise, sweating hard. Everything is built on sweat, so that bodies and minds may not be dismayed at passing from shade to sun and from sun to frost, from tunic to breastplate, from silence to shouting, from quiet to tumult. So you, blessed ones, count whatever is hard here as training for the virtues of soul and body. You are about to undergo a noble contest, in which the president of the games is the living God, the master of the exercises the Holy Spirit, the crown of eternity, the prize of angelic nature, citizenship in heaven, glory for ever and ever. Therefore your trainer Christ Jesus, who has anointed you with the Spirit and led you out to this arena, has willed before the day of the contest to set you apart from a freer condition to harsher handling, so that your strength might be made firm in you. For athletes too are set apart for a stricter discipline, so that they may devote themselves to building up strength. They are kept from luxury, from richer foods, from pleasanter drink; they are driven, racked, worn out: the more they have toiled in training, the more they hope for victory. “And they,” says the apostle, “to obtain a perishable crown.” We, who are to obtain an eternal one, regard the prison as our wrestling school, so that we may be led out to the stadium of the judgment seat well trained in every hardship, because virtue is built up by hardness and destroyed by softness.