* * * *

The saints made God, and the accomplishment of his holy will, the great
object of all their petitions to their prayers, and their only aim in
all their actions. "God," says St. Austin,[4] "in his promises to hear
our prayers, is desirous to bestow himself upon us; if you find any
thing better than him, ask it, but if you ask any thing beneath him, you
put an affront upon him, and hurt yourself by preferring to him a
creature which he framed: pray in the spirit and sentiment of love, in
which the royal prophet said to him, 'Thou, O Lord, art my portion.'[5]
Let others choose to themselves portions among creatures, for my part,
Thou art my portion, Thee alone have I chosen for my whole inheritance."

Footnotes:
1. Hist. l. 6, c. 29.
2. Cypr. Ep. 30. Ed. Pam.
3. Ep. 44 ad. Corn.
4. S. Aug. Conc. 1, in Ps. 34.
5. Ps. lxxii. 26.

ST. SEBASTIAN, M.

From his acts, written before the end of the fourth age. The gladiators,
who were abolished by Honorius, in 403, subsisted when these acts were
compiled. See Bollandus, who thinks St. Ambrose wrote them, also
Tillemont, t. 1, p. 551.

A.D. 288.

ST. SEBASTIAN was born at Narbonne, in Gaul, but his parents were of
Milan, in Italy, and he was brought up in that city. He was a fervent
servant of Christ, and though his natural inclinations gave him an
aversion to a military life, yet to be better able, without suspicion,
to assist the confessors and martyrs in their sufferings, he went to
Rome, and entered the army under the emperor Carinus, about the year
283. It happened that the martyrs, Marcus and Marcellianus, under
sentence of death, appeared in danger of being shaken in their faith by
the tears of their friends: Sebastian seeing this, stepped in, and made
them a long exhortation to constancy, which {184} he delivered with the
holy fire, that strongly affected all his hearers. Zoe, the wife of
Nicostratus, having for six years lost the use of speech by a palsy in
her tongue, fell at his feet, and spoke distinctly, by the saint's
making the sign of the cross on her mouth. She, with her husband
Nicostratus, who was master of the rolls,[1] the parents of Marcus and
Marcellianus, the jailor Claudius, and sixteen other prisoners, were
converted; and Nicostratus, who had charge of the prisoners, took them
to his own house, where Polycarp, a holy priest, instructed and baptized
them. Chromatius, governor of Rome, being informed of this,