his friend, a priest of Antioch,
superior of the apostolic missions in Phoenicia and Arabia. The letters
of Constantius are added to those of St. Chrysostom. The seventeen
letters of our saint to St. Olympias might be styled treatises. He tells
her,[38] "I daily exult and am transported with joy in my heart under my
sufferings, in which I find a hidden treasure: and I beg that you
rejoice on the same account, and that you bless and praise God, by whose
mercy we obtain to such a degree the grace of suffering." He often
enlarges on the great evils and most pernicious consequences of sadness
and dejection of spirit, which he calls[39] "the worst of human evils, a
perpetual domestic rack, a darkness and tempest of the mind, an interior
war, a distemper which consumes the vigor of the soul, and impairs all
her faculties." He shows[40] that sickness is the greatest of trials, a
time not of inaction, but of the greatest merit, the school of all
virtues, and a true martyrdom. He advises her to use physic, and says it
would be a criminal impatience to wish for death to be freed from
sufferings. He laments the fall of Pelagius, whose heresies he abhorred.
He wrote to this lady his excellent treatise, That no one can hurt him
who does not hurt himself. Arsacius dying in 405, many ambitiously
aspired to that dignity, whose very seeking it was sufficient to prove
them unworthy. Atticus, one of this number, a violent enemy to St.
Chrysostom, was preferred by the court, and placed in his chair. The
pope refused to hold communion with Theophilus or any of the abettors of
the persecution of our saint.[41] He and the emperor Honorius sent five
bishops to Constantinople to insist on a council, and that, in the mean
time, St. Chrysostom should be restored to his see, his deposition
having been notoriously unjust.[42] But the deputies were cast into prison
in Thrace, because they refused to communicate with Atticus. The
persecutors saw that, if the council was held, they would be inevitably
condemned and deposed by it, therefore they stuck at nothing to prevent
its meeting. The incursions of the Isaurian plunderers obliged St.
Chrysostom to take shelter in the castle of Arabissus, on{250} Mount
Taurus. He enjoyed a tolerable state of health during the year 406 and
the winter following, though it was extremely cold in those mountains,
so that the Armenians were surprised to see how his thin, weak body was
able to support it. When the Isaurian