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

To the Westerns.I am unwilling to describe these one by one, lest the feebleness of my narrative should makethe evidence of the calamities less convincing. It is moreover the less necessary for me totell you of them, because you have long known what has happened from the reports whichwill have reached you. The sum and substance of our troubles is this: the people have leftthe 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, inheavy rain, in the snow, the gales and the frost of winter as well as in summer under theblazing heat of the sun. All this they are suffering because they refuse to have anything todo with the wicked leaven of Arius.3. How could mere words give you any clear idea of all this without your being stirredto 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 theground, and to send messengers to remind us of the prizes in store for the reward of all whopatiently suffer for Christ. A voice that we are used to is naturally less able to comfort usthan one which sounds from afar, and that one coming from men who over all the worldare known by God’s grace to be among the noblest; for common report everywhere representsyou as having remained steadfast, without suffering a wound in your faith, and as havingkept the deposit of the apostles inviolate. This is not our case. There are among us somewho, through lust of glory and that puffing up which is especially wont to destroy the soulsof Christian men, have audaciously uttered certain novelties of expression with the resultthat the Churches have become like cracked pots and pans and have let in the inrush ofheretical impurity. But do you, whom we love and long for, be to us as surgeons for thewounded, as trainers for the whole, healing the limb that is diseased, and anointing the limbthat is sound for the service of the true religion.283even when matched with the cruelties perpetrated under Nero and Diocletian, if the evidence for them weresatisfactory. cf. Milman, Hist. Christ. iii. 45. The main difference between the earlier persecutions, conventionallyreckoned as ten, and the persecution of the Catholics by Valens, seems to be this, that while the former were aputting in force of the law against a religio non licita, the latter was but the occasional result of the personal spiteand partizanship of the imperial heretic and his courtiers. Valens would feel bitterly towards a Catholic whothwarted him. Basil could under Diocletian hardly have died in his bed as archbishop of Cæsarea.782