touchstone archives
Commonplaces
Piquant excerpts lifted from Touchstone editors' own reading & listening.
Issue:
There was never anything on his lips except Christ, never anything in his heart except devotion, peace and forgiveness. He often used to weep even for the sins of those who appeared to be his critics and who tore at him with their poisonous tongues and viperous jaws while he remained detached and calm. In fact, we knew some people who envied his virtue and his life and who hated in him what they did not see in themselves and what they were unable to imitate. And it was said (what a grievous and lamentable scandal!) that most of his critics, few in number though they were, were actually bishops. It is certainly unnecessary to name them, although many of them bark at us, too. It will suffice that if any one of them should read this and recognize the truth, he should blush with shame, for if he grows angry, he will be admitting that he is the one who is meant, although we might have had others in mind. But we cannot evade the fact that if there are people of this kind, they will hate us as well as a man like Martin.
—Sulpicius Severus
Life of Martin of Tours, ch. XXVII (trans. by Carolinne White in Early Christian Lives)
— Christianity — Commonplaces #228 — —
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