appened at Antioch on the 26th of February, 387, just after
the saint had preached the first of the sermons, in which he spoke
against drunkenness and blasphemy, pressing all persons to expel their
company any one who should blaspheme. After the sedition, he was silent,
in the general grief and consternation, for seven days: then made his
second sermon, in which he tells the people that their confusion and
remorse is itself a greater punishment than it was in the power of the
emperor to inflict; he exhorts them to alms-deeds, and to hope in the
mercy of Christ, who, leaving the earth, left us his own flesh, which
yet he carried with him to heaven, and that blood which he spilt for us,
he again imparted to us. After this, what will he refuse to do for our
salvation? The third sermon being made in the beginning of Lent, the
preacher inculcates the obligation of fasting: from his words it is
clear that Christians then abstained from wine and fish no less than
from fowls and all flesh. He insists chiefly on the moral fast of the
will from all sin, and of all the senses by self-denials in each of
them. Detraction he singles out as the most common sin, and exhorts us
to abhor, with the royal prophet, every one who secretly detracts
another; to say to such, "If you have any thing to say to the advantage
of another, I will hear you with pleasure; but if you have only ill to
tell me, this is what I cannot listen to." If detracters were thoroughly
persuaded that by their evil speeches they rendered themselves more
odious than those of whom they speak ill, they would be effectually
cured of this pestilential habit. The saint draws an inference from what
the people then saw before their eyes, and represented to them that if
emperors punish with extreme rigor those who injure their statues, with
what severity will God revenge the injury done by the detracter to his
living image, and that offered by the blasphemer to his own adorable
name. In the fourth homily, he speaks on the usefulness of afflictions,
which withdraw men from many dangers of sin, and make them earnestly
seek God. In the fifth, he continues the same subject, and shows that
they ought not to fear death, if they prepare themselves for it by
sincere penance. Their conversion he would have them begin by correcting
the habit of swearing, which had taken deep root among many of them.
This victory, he says, would be easy if every one who had contracted
such a habit would enj