(6) And once more it occurs to me to consider the days and years of this
period of the Empire. For I observe that the ungodly persons (I have
mentioned) after a short period of honourable mention have lost their
good name, but (Gallienus) who was more righteous and loved God
better,[144] having completed the seven years' period, is now passing
through his ninth year:[145] therefore let us keep the Feast.[146]
To the Brethren in Alexandria
(Eus., _H. E._ vii. 22)
(_Part of another Easter Letter_)
(1) Other men would not think the present a time for "keeping festival:
nor, indeed, is this nor any other such a time to them; I speak not of
times obviously sorrowful, but even of such as they might consider most
joyful. In these days there are lamentations everywhere, and all are
mourning: wailings resound through the city by reason of the number of
the dead and the dying day by day. For, as it is written about the
firstborn of the Egyptians, so now also "a great cry arose: for there is
not a house in which there is not one dead."[147] I would, indeed, there
were but one; for the things that have before now befallen us were truly
many and grievous.[148] First of all they drove us into exile and we kept
the feast then too by ourselves, persecuted and harried to death by all,
and every place where each particular affliction befel us became the
scene of our festal assembly, open country, desert, ship, inn or prison,
and our perfect[149] martyrs spent the brightest of all feasts, being
entertained in heaven above. But after this war and famine seized us,
which we endured in common with the Gentiles, having undergone alone all
the injuries they had inflicted on us and then having to share in the
evils they wrought on one another and suffered: and once more we rejoiced
in the peace of Christ, which He has given to us alone. But now after we
and they had obtained a very brief respite, this pestilence has overtaken
us, which is to them a more fearful thing than all former fears and more
terrible than any calamity whatever, and to quote an expression of an
historian of their own,[150] "a thing which alone has exceeded all men's
expectation," while to us it was not so much that as a discipline and a
testing no less severe than any of the rest: for it did not spare us,
though it attacked the Gentiles in great force.