bs should be found in it, he promised that no pains should be spared
to change them into good. He bid them consider if they rejoiced so much
as they testified, to see him again who was only one, how great his joy
must be which was multiplied in every one of them: he calls himself
their bond-slave, chained to their service, but says, that slavery was
his delight, and that during his absence he ever had them present to his
mind, offering up his prayers for their temporal and spiritual welfare.

It remained that our saint should glorify God by his sufferings, as he
had already done by his labors: and if we contemplate the mystery of the
cross with the eyes of faith, we shall find him greater in the
persecutions he sustained than in all the other occurrences of his life.
At the same time we cannot sufficiently deplore the blindness of envy
and pride in his enemies, as in the Pharisees against Christ himself. We
ought to tremble for ourselves: if that passion does not make us
persecute a Chrysostom, it may often betray us into rash judgments,
aversions, and other sins, even under a cloak of virtue. The first open
adversary of our saint was Severianus, bishop of Gabala, in Syria, to
whom the saint had left the care of his church during his absence. This
mart had acquired the reputation of a preacher, was a favorite of the
empress Eudoxia, and had employed all his talents and dexterity to
establish himself in the good opinion of the court and people, to the
prejudice of the saint, against whom he had preached in his own city.
Severianus being obliged to leave Constantinople at the saint's return,
he made an excellent discourse to his flock on the peace Christ came to
establish on earth, and begged they would receive again Severianus, whom
they {246} had expelled the city. Another enemy of the saint was
Theophilus, patriarch of Alexandria, whom Sozomen, Socrates, Palladius,
St. Isidore of Pelusium, and Synesius, accuse of avarice and oppressions
to gratify his vanity in building stately churches; of pride, envy,
revenge, dissimulation, and an incontrollable love of power and rule, by
which he treated other bishops as his slaves, and made his will the rule
of justice. His three paschal letters, which have reached us, show that
he wrote without method, and that his reflections and reasonings were
neither just nor apposite: whence the loss of his other writings is not
much to be regretted. These spiritual vices sullied his zeal agai