Nicene and Post-Nicene Church Fathers Series 2 - The Still Small ...

Homiletical.
health if he be sick. Let your supplications be made with the martyrs. Let young men imitate
their fellows. Let fathers pray to be fathers of like sons. Let mothers learn from a good
mother. The mother of one of these saints saw the rest overcome by the cold, and her son,
from his strength or his constancy, yet alive. The executioners had left him, on the chance
of his having changed his mind. She herself lifted him in her arms, and placed him on the
car in which the rest were being drawn to the pyre, a veritable martyr’s mother. 692
692 The name of this youngest of the Forty is given as Melito (D.C.B. s.v.). They are commemorated on
March 9 in the Roman Kalendar of Gregory XIII. and the Menology of Basil; on March 10 in the Roman Mart.
of Bened. XIV.; on the 11th in the old Roman Kal., and on March 16 in the Armenian. The legend of the discovery
of some of their relics is given in Sozomen ix. 2. Others were obtained for the church built in their honour at
Annesi. (cf. p. xiv.) Two doctrinal points come out in this homily, (a) The officer who took the place of Melito
is said to have been baptized, not in water but in his own blood (§ 7). Here is martyrdom represented as the
equivalent of baptism. (b) The stage arrived at in the progress of Christian sentiment towards the invocation
of departed saints is indicated. Garnier, the Jesuit, writes in the margin of the passage quoted above, Invocantur
martyres; and Ceillier notes, Il reconnait que les prieres des martyrs peuvent beaucoup nous aider auprés de Dieu.
But in this particular passage the idea of “fleeing to the Forty” seems to be not fleeing to them to ask for their
prayers, but fleeing to the shrine to pray in company with them. It is rather the fellowship than the intercession
of the saints which is sought. μετὰ μαρτύρων γιγνέσθω τὰ αἰτήματα ὑμῶν. Let your requests be made not to
but with the martyrs. In the Homily on St. Mamas, the next in order, the expressions are less equivocal. At the
same time it must be remarked that with St. Basil the invocation and the intercession are local. In the De Sp.
Scto. (chap. xxiii. p. 34) a significant contrast is drawn between the ubiquity of the Holy Ghost and the limited
and local action of angels. And if of angels, so of saints. The saints who have departed this life are thought of
as accessible at the shrines where their relics rest, but, if we apply the analogy of the De Sp. Scto., not everywhere.
It has been said that this is the period when requests for the prayers of the holy dead begin to appear, and
Archbishop Ussher (Address to a Jesuit, chap. ix.) cites Gregory of Nazianzus for the earliest instance within his
knowledge of a plain invocation of the departed. But, as bishop Harold Browne points out, his invocation is
rather rhetorical than supplicatory. Gregory “had even a pious persuasion that they still continued as much as
ever to aid with their prayers those for whom they had been wont to pray on earth (Orat. xxiv. p. 425). And he
ventures to think if it be not too bold to say so (εἰ μὴ τολυηρὸν τοῦτο εἰπεῖν), that the saints, being nearer to
God and having put off the fetters of the flesh, have more avail with Him than when on earth (Orat. xix. p. 228).
In all these he does not appear to have gone further than some who preceded him, nor is there anything in such
speculations beyond what might be consistent with the most Protestant abhorrence of saint worship and Mari-
olatry” (Bp. Harold Browne in Art. xxii.). Romish authorities in support of a yet earlier development, point to
Irenæus (Adv. Hær. v. 19), wherein a highly rhetorical passage the Virgin Mary is said to have become the “ad-
vocate” of the Virgin Eve, and to Origen, who “invoked” his guardian angel (Hom. i. in Ezek. 7). The later
mediæval invocation Bp. Jeremy Taylor (vol. vi. Eden’s ed. p. 489) ingeniously shews to be of a piece rather with
early heresy than with early Catholicity: “It pretends to know their present state, which is hid from our eyes;
and it proceeds upon the very reason upon which the Gnostics and Valentinians went; that is, that it is fit to
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