ST. ALEXANDER studied with Origen in the great Christian school of
Alexandria, under St. Pantenus and his successor, St. Clement. He was
chosen bishop of a certain city in Cappadocia. In the persecution of
Severus, in 204, he made a glorious confession of his faith, and though
he did not then seal it with his blood, he suffered several years'
imprisonment, till the beginning of the reign of Caracalla, in 211, when
he wrote to congratulate the church of Antioch upon the election of St.
Asclepias, a glorious confessor of Christ, to that patriarchate; the
news of which, he says, had softened and made light the irons with which
he was loaded. He sent that letter by the priest St. Clement of
Alexandria, a man of great virtue, whom God had sent into Cappadocia to
instruct and govern his people during his confinement.
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St. Alexander being enlarged soon after, in 212, was commanded by a
revelation from God to go to Jerusalem to visit the holy places.[1] The
night before his arrival, St. Narcissus, bishop of Jerusalem, and some
other saints of that church, had a revelation, in which they heard a
distinct voice commanding them to go out of the city and take for bishop
him whom God sent them. St. Narcissus was then very old and decrepit: he
and his flock seized Alexander, and by the consent of all the bishops of
Palestine, assembled in a council, made him his coadjutor and joint
bishop of Jerusalem. SS. Narcissus and Alexander still governed this
church together, when the latter wrote thus to the Antinoits: "I salute
you in the name of Narcissus, who held here the place of bishop before
me, and, being above one hundred and sixteen years old, is now united
with me by prayer. He conjures you with me to live in inviolable peace
and union." St. Alexander collected at Jerusalem a great library,
consisting of the writings and letters of eminent men, which subsisted
when Eusebius wrote. He excelled all other holy prelates and apostolic
men in mildness and in the sweetness of his discourses, as Origen
testifies. St. Alexander was seized by the persecutors under Decius,
confessed Christ a second time, and died in chains at Caesarea, about the
end of the year 251, as Eusebius testifies. He is styled a martyr by St.
Epiphanius, St. Jerom, and the Martyrologies, and honored in the Roman
Martyrology on the 18th of March; by the Greeks on the 16th of May and
the 22d of December.
* * * * *
A pastor must first acquire a solid degree of interior virtue, before he
can safely undertake to labor in procuring the salvation of others, or
employ himself in exterior functions of the ministry. He must have
mortified the deeds of the flesh by compunction, and the habitual
practice of self-denial; and the fruits of the spirit must daily more
and more perfectly subdue his passions. These fruits of the spirit are
charity and humility, which stifle all the motions of anger, envy, and
pride: holy joy, which banishes carnal sadness, sloth, and all disrelish
in spiritual exercises; peace, which crushes the seeds of discord, and
the love and relish of heavenly things, which extinguish the love of
earthly goods and sensual pleasures. One whose soul is slothful,
sensual, and earthly, deserves not to bear the name of a Christian, much
less of a minister of the gospel. There never was a saint who did not
carry his cross, and walk in the steps of Christ crucified. St.
Alexander would have thought a day lost in which he did not add
something to the sacrifice of his penance in order to continue and
complete it. By this he prepared himself to die a victim of fidelity and
charity. This is the continued martyrdom by which every true Christian
earnestly labors to render himself every day more and more pleasing to
God, making his body a pure holocaust to him by mortification, and his
soul, by the fervor of his charity and compunction.
Footnotes:
1. Eus. b. 6, c. 14. S. Hieron. in Catal.