A VIOLENT pestilence laid waste the greatest part of the Roman empire
during twelve years, from 249 to 263. Five thousand persons died of it
in one day in Rome, in 262. St. Dionysius of Alexandria relates, that a
cruel sedition and civil war had filled that city with murders and
tumults; so that it was safer to travel from the eastern to the western
parts of the then known world, than to go from one street of Alexandria
to another. The pestilence succeeded this first scourge, and with such
violence, that there was not a single house in that great city which
entirely escaped it, or which had not some dead to mourn for. All places
were filled with groans, and the living appeared almost dead with fear.
The noisome exhalations of carcasses, and the very winds, which should
have purified the air, loaded with infection and pestilential vapors
from the Nile, increased the evil. The fear of death rendered the
heathens cruel towards their nearest relations. As soon as any of them
had caught the contagion, though their dearest friends, they avoided and
fled from them as their greatest enemies. They threw them half dead into
the streets, and abandoned them without succor; they left their bodies
without burial, so fearful were they of catching that mortal distemper,
which, however, it was very difficult to avoid, notwithstanding all
their precautions. This sickness, which was the greatest of calamities
to the pagans, was but an exercise and trial to the Christians, who
showed, on that occasion, how contrary the spirit of charity is to the
interestedness of self love. During the persecutions of Decius, Gallus,
and Valerian, they durst not appear, but were obliged to keep their
assemblies in solitudes, or in ships tossed on the waves, or in infected
prisons, or the like places, which the sanctity of our mysteries made
venerable. Yet in the {483} time of this public calamity, most of them,
regardless of the danger of their own lives to assisting others,
visited, relieved, and attended the sick, and comforted the dying. They
closed their eyes, carried them on their shoulders, laid them out,
washed their bodies, and decently interred them, and soon after shared
the same fate themselves; but those who survived still succeeded to
their charitable office, which they paid to the very pagans their
persecutors. "Thus," adds St. Dionysius, "the best of our brethren have
departed this life; some of the most valuable, both of priests, deacons,
and laics; and it is thought that this kind of death is in nothing
different from martyrdom." And the Roman Martyrology says, the religious
faith of pious Christians honors them as martyrs.
* * * * *
In these happy victims of holy charity we admire how powerfully perfect
virtue, and the assured expectation of eternal bliss, raises the true
Christian above all earthly views. He who has always before his eyes the
incomprehensible happiness of enjoying God in his glory, and seriously
considers the infinite advantage, peace, and honor annexed to his divine
service; he who is inflamed with ardent love of God, and zeal for his
honor, sets no value on any thing but in proportion as it affords him a
means of improving his spiritual stock, advancing the divine honor, and
more perfectly uniting his soul to God by every heroic virtue:
disgraces, dangers, labor, pain, death, loss of goods or friends, and
every other sacrifice here become his gain and his greatest joy. That by
which he most perfectly devotes himself to God, and most speedily and
securely attains to the bliss of possessing him, he regards as his
greatest happiness.