From the panegyric of St. Chrysostom, t. 2, p. 671. Ed. Ben. Tillem. t.
5, p. 573.
THIS saint was a Cilician, of a senatorian family in Anazarbus, and a
minister of the gospel. In the persecution of Dioclesian he fell into
the hands of a judge, who, by his brutal behavior, resembled more a wild
beast than a man. The president, seeing his constancy proof against the
sharpest torments, hoped to overcome him by the long continuance of his
martyrdom. He caused him to be brought before his tribunal everyday;
sometimes he caressed him, at other times threatened him with a thousand
tortures. For a whole year together he caused him to be dragged as a
malefactor through all the towns of Cilicia, imagining that this shame
and confusion might vanquish {598} him: but it served only to increase
the martyr's glory, and gave him an opportunity of encouraging in the
faith all the Christians of Cilicia by his example and exhortations. He
suffered every kind of torture. The bloody executioners had torn his
flesh, furrowed his sides, laid his bones bare, and exposed his very
bowels to view. Scourges, fire, and the sword, were employed various
ways to torment him with the utmost cruelty. The judge saw that to
torment him longer was laboring to shake a rock, and was forced at
length to own himself conquered by condemning him to death: in which,
however, he studied to surpass his former cruelty. He was then at AEgea,
a town on the sea-coast; and he caused the martyr to be sewed up in a
sack with scorpions, serpents, and vipers, and so thrown into the sea.
This was the Roman punishment for parricides, the worst of malefactors,
yet seldom executed on them. Eusebius mentions, that St. Ulpian of Tyre
suffered a like martyrdom, being thrown into the sea in a leather sack,
together with a dog and an aspick. The sea gave back the body of our
holy martyr, which the faithful conveyed to Alexandria of Cilicia, and
afterwards to Antioch, where St. Chrysostom pronounced his panegyric
before his shrine. He eloquently sets forth how much these sacred relics
were honored; and affirms, that no devil could stand their presence, and
that men by them found a remedy for their bodlily distempers, and the
cure of the evils of the soul.
* * * * *
The martyrs lost with joy their worldly honors, dignity, estates,
friends, liberty, and lives, rather than forfeit for one moment their
fidelity to God. They courageously bade defiance to pleasures and
torments, to prosperity and adversity, to life and death, saying, with
the apostle: _Who shall separate us from the love of Jesus Christ?_
Crowns, sceptres, worldly riches, and pleasures, you have no charms
which shall ever tempt me to depart in the least tittle from the
allegiance which I owe to God. Alarming fears of the most dreadful
evils, prisons, racks, fire, and death, in every shape of cruelty, you
shall never shake my constancy. Nothing shall ever separate me from the
love of Christ. This must be the sincere disposition of every Christian.
Lying protestations of fidelity to God cost us nothing: but he sounds
the heart. Is our constancy such as to bear evidence to our sincerity,
that rather than to fail in the least duty to God, we are ready to
resist to blood? and that we are always upon our guard to keep our ears
shut to the voices of those syrens which never cease to lay snares to
our senses?