this fail the whole structure is reduced to ruin; we cease to be God's friends; we become His enemies.
Hence the constancy with which the martyrs endured such cruel torments. Rather than be deprived of God's grace by mortal sin they submitted to be burned, to have their flesh torn with heated irons, and to suffer every torture which the cruelty of men could invent. They knew that had they sinned they could, if time were given them, repent and obtain forgiveness, as Peter did immediately after denying his Master; yet the most terrible torments were more tolerable to them than the momentary deprivation of God's favor and grace.
Holy Scripture gives us a glorious example of this constancy in the mother of the seven sons, whom she exhorted to die manfully, and whose martyrdom she heroically witnessed before she gave up her own life for the law.[1] Equally sublime was the fortitude of Felicitas and Symphorosa, who lived in the early age of the Church, and who had also seven sons each. These intrepid soldiers of Christ were present at the martyrdom of their children, and in accents of sublime courage besought them to endure their tortures with constancy. They had the heavenly consolation of seeing them die for Christ, and then, with a heroism born only of faith, they yielded their own lives to complete the sacrifice. In his Life of St. Paul, the first hermit, St. Jerome tells of a young man whom, after the tyrants had vainly used many means
- ↑ 2 Mach. vii.
