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| To Eudoxius
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Letter XLVIII.
(a.d. 398.)
To My Lord Eudoxius, My Brother
and Fellow-Presbyter, Beloved and Longed For, and to the Brethren
Who are with Him,1679
| 1679 The monastery of these brethren was in the island
of Capraria—the same, I suppose, with Caprera—now so widely
famous as Garibaldi’s home. | Augustin and
the Brethren Who are Here Send Greeting.
1. When we reflect upon the undisturbed rest
which you enjoy in Christ, we also, although engaged in labours
manifold and arduous, find rest with you, beloved. We are one body
under one Head, so that you share our toils, and we share your
repose: for “if one member suffer, all the members suffer with
it; or if one member be honoured, all the members rejoice with
it.”1680
Therefore
we earnestly exhort and beseech you, by the deep humility and most
compassionate majesty of Christ, to be mindful of us in your holy
intercessions; for we believe you to be more lively and
undistracted in prayer than we can be, whose prayers are often
marred and weakened by the darkness and confusion arising from
secular occupations: not that we have these on our own account, but
we can scarcely breathe for the pressure of such duties imposed
upon us by men compelling us, so to speak, to go with them one
mile, with whom we are commanded by our Lord to go farther than
they ask.1681
We
believe, nevertheless, that He before whom the sighing of the
prisoner comes1682
will look
on us persevering in the ministry in which He was pleased to put
us, with promise of reward, and, by the assistance of your prayers,
will set us free from all distress.
2. We exhort you in the Lord, brethren, to be
stedfast in your purpose, and persevere to the end; and if the
Church, your Mother, calls you to active service, guard against
accepting it, on the one hand, with too eager elation of spirit, or
declining it, on the other, under the solicitations of indolence;
and obey God with a lowly heart, submitting yourselves in meekness
to Him who governs you, who will guide the meek in judgment, and
will teach them His way.1683
Do not prefer your own ease to the
claims of the Church; for if no good men were willing to minister
to her in her bringing forth of her spiritual children, the
beginning of your own spiritual life would have been impossible. As
men must keep the way carefully in walking between fire and water,
so as to be neither burned nor drowned, so must we order our steps
between the pinnacle of pride and the whirlpool of indolence; as it
is written, “declining neither to the right hand nor to the
left.”1684
For some,
while guarding too anxiously against being lifted up and raised, as
it were, to the dangerous heights on the right hand, have
fallen and been
engulphed in the depths on the left. Again, others, while turning
too eagerly from the danger on the left hand of being immersed in
the torpid effeminacy of inaction, are, on the other hand, so
destroyed and consumed by the extravagance of self-conceit, that
they vanish into ashes and smoke. See then, beloved, that in your
love of ease you restrain yourselves from all mere earthly delight,
and remember that there is no place where the fowler who fears lest
we fly back to God may not lay snares for us; let us account him
whose captives we once were to be the sworn enemy of all good men;
let us never consider ourselves in possession of perfect peace
until iniquity shall have ceased, and “judgment shall have
returned unto righteousness.”1685
| 1685 Ps. lvii. 1 and xciv. 15. |
3. Moreover, when you are exerting yourselves
with energy and fervour, whatever you do, whether labouring
diligently in prayer, fasting, or almsgiving, or distributing to
the poor, or forgiving injuries, “as God also for Christ’s sake
hath forgiven us,”1686
or subduing evil habits, and
chastening the body and bringing it into subjection,1687
or bearing
tribulation, and especially bearing with one another in love (for
what can he bear who is not patient with his brother?), or guarding
against the craft and wiles of the tempter, and by the shield of
faith averting and extinguishing his fiery darts,1688
or
“singing and making melody to the Lord in your hearts,” or with
voices in harmony with your hearts;1689
—whatever you do, I say, “do
all to the glory of God,”1690
who “worketh all in all,”1691
and be so
“fervent in Spirit”1692
that your “soul may make her
boast in the Lord.”1693
Such is the course of those who
walk in the “straight way,” whose “eyes are ever upon the
Lord, for He shall pluck their feet out of the net.”1694
Such a
course is neither interrupted by business, nor benumbed by leisure,
neither boisterous nor languid, neither presumptuous nor
desponding, neither reckless nor supine. “These things do, and
the God of peace shall be with you.”1695
4. Let your charity prevent you from
accounting me forward in wishing to address you by letter. I remind
you of these things, not because I think you come short in them,
but because I thought that I would be much commended unto God by
you, if, in doing your duty to Him, you do it with a remembrance of
my exhortation. For good report, even before the coming of the
brethren Eustasius and Andreas from you, had brought to us, as they
did, the good savour of Christ, which is yielded by your holy
conversation. Of these, Eustasius has gone before us to that land
of rest, on the shore of which beat no rude waves such as those
which encompass your island home, and in which he does not regret
Caprera, for the homely raiment1696
| 1696 Cilicium, the garment of goats’ hair worn by the
brethren. These were the staple article of manufacture in Caprera,
“the goat island.” | with which it furnished him he
wears no more.
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