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

I am unwilling to describe these one by one, lest the feebleness of my narrative should make
the evidence of the calamities less convincing. It is moreover the less necessary for me to
tell you of them, because you have long known what has happened from the reports which
will have reached you. The sum and substance of our troubles is this: the people have left
the houses of prayer and are holding congregations in the wildernesses. It is a sad sight.
Women, boys, old men, and those who are in other ways infirm, remain in the open air, in
heavy rain, in the snow, the gales and the frost of winter as well as in summer under the
blazing heat of the sun. All this they are suffering because they refuse to have anything to
do with the wicked leaven of Arius.
3. How could mere words give you any clear idea of all this without your being stirred
to sympathy by personal experience and the evidence of eyewitnesses? We implore you,
therefore, to stretch out a helping hand to those that have already been stricken to the
ground, and to send messengers to remind us of the prizes in store for the reward of all who
patiently suffer for Christ. A voice that we are used to is naturally less able to comfort us
than one which sounds from afar, and that one coming from men who over all the world
are known by God’s grace to be among the noblest; for common report everywhere represents
you as having remained steadfast, without suffering a wound in your faith, and as having
kept the deposit of the apostles inviolate. This is not our case. There are among us some
who, through lust of glory and that puffing up which is especially wont to destroy the souls
of Christian men, have audaciously uttered certain novelties of expression with the result
that the Churches have become like cracked pots and pans and have let in the inrush of
heretical impurity. But do you, whom we love and long for, be to us as surgeons for the
wounded, as trainers for the whole, healing the limb that is diseased, and anointing the limb
that is sound for the service of the true religion.
even when matched with the cruelties perpetrated under Nero and Diocletian, if the evidence for them were
satisfactory. cf. Milman, Hist. Christ. iii. 45. The main difference between the earlier persecutions, conventionally
reckoned as ten, and the persecution of the Catholics by Valens, seems to be this, that while the former were a
putting in force of the law against a religio non licita, the latter was but the occasional result of the personal spite
and partizanship of the imperial heretic and his courtiers. Valens would feel bitterly towards a Catholic who
thwarted him. Basil could under Diocletian hardly have died in his bed as archbishop of Cæsarea.
To the Westerns.
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