Had you been
free, no one would charge you with desertion; but since you are
contracted to so great a king, you are not at your own disposal." St.
Chrysostom pathetically shows him the danger, baseness, and crime of
deferring his repentance, sets before him hell, the emptiness of the
world, the uneasiness and troubles which usually attend a married life,
and the sweetness of the yoke of Christ. He closes this pressing
exhortation by mentioning the tears and prayers of his friends, which
they would never interrupt, till they had the comfort of seeing him
raised from his fall. St. Chrysostom wrote these two exhortations about
the year 369, which was the second that he spent in his mother's house
at Antioch when he led there an ascetic life. The fruit of his zeal and
charity was the conversion of Theodorus, who broke his engagements with
the world, and returned to his solitude. In 381 he was made bishop of
Mopsuestia. In opposing the Apollinarist heresy, he had the misfortune
to lay the seeds of Nestorianism in a book which he composed on the
Incarnation, and other writings. He became a declared protector of
Julian the Pelagian, when he took refuge in the East; wrote an express
treatise against original sin; and maintained the Pelagian errors in a
multitude of other works, which were all condemned after his death,
though only fragments of them have reached us, preserved chiefly in
Facundus, Photius, and several councils. He died in 428, before the
solemn condemnation of his errors, and in the communion of the Catholic
church. See Tillemont, t. 12.

During St. Chrysostom's retreat in the mountains, two devout servants of
God desired of him certain instructions on the means of attaining to the
virtue of compunction. Demetrius, the first of these, though he was
arrived at a high degree of perfection in an ascetic life, always ranked
himself among those who crawl on the earth, and said often to St.
Chrysostom, kissing his hand, and watering it with tears, "Assist me to
soften the hardness of my heart." St. Chrysostom addressed to him his
first book on Compunction, in which he tells him that he was not
unacquainted with this grace, of which he had a pledge in the
earnestness of his desire to obtain it, his love of retirement, his
watching whole nights, and his abundant tears, even those with which,
squeezing him by the hand, he lead begged the succor of his advice and
prayers, in order to soften his dry, stony heart into compu