NPNF2-08. Basil: Letters and Select Works - Holy Bible Institute

To Ascholius.Letter CLXIV. 2547To Ascholius. 25481. It would not be easy for me to say how very much delighted I am with your holiness’sletter. My words are too weak to express all that I feel; you, however, ought to be able toconjecture it, from the beauty of what you have written. For what did not your letter contain?It contained love to God; the marvellous description of the martyrs, which put the mannerof their good fight so plainly before me that I seemed actually to see it; love and kindnessto myself; words of surpassing beauty. So when I had taken it into my hands, and read itmany times, and perceived how abundantly full it was of the grace of the Spirit, I thoughtthat I had gone back to the good old times, when God’s Churches flourished, rooted in faith,united in love, all the members being in harmony, as though in one body. Then the persecutorswere manifest, and manifest too the persecuted. Then the people grew more numerousby being attacked. Then the blood of the martyrs, watering the Churches, nourished manymore champions of true religion, each generation stripping for the struggle with the zeal ofthose that had gone before. Then we Christians were in peace with one another, the peacewhich the Lord bequeathed us, of which, so cruelly have we driven it from among us, not asingle trace is now left us. Yet my soul did go back to that blessedness of old, when a lettercame from a long distance, bright with the beauty of love, and a martyr travelled to me fromwild regions beyond the Danube, preaching in his own person the exactitude of the faithwhich is there observed. Who could tell the delight of my soul at all this? What power ofspeech could be devised competent to describe all that I felt in the bottom of my heart?However, when I saw the athlete, I blessed his trainer: he, too, before the just Judge, afterstrengthening many for the conflict on behalf of true religion, shall receive the crown ofrighteousness.2. By bringing the blessed Eutyches 2549 to my recollection, and honouring my countryfor having sown the seeds of true religion, you have at once delighted me by your reminderof the past, and distressed me by your conviction of the present. None of us now comesnear Eutyches in goodness: so far are we from bringing barbarians under the softeningpower of the Spirit, and the operation of His graces, that by the greatness of our sins we turngentle hearted men into barbarians, for to ourselves and to our sins I attribute it that theinfluence of the heretics is so widely diffused. Peradventure no part of the world has escaped2162547 Placed in 374.2548 cf. Letter liv.2549 Eutyches was a Cappadocian, who was taken prisoner by the Goths, in the reign of Gallienus, in a raidinto Cappadocia. It was through the teaching of these captives that the ancestors of Ulphilas became Christians.cf. Philost., H.E. ii. 5.623