ST. JULIAN, OF CILICIA, M.
From the panegyric of St. Chrysostom, t. 2, p.
671. Ed. Ben. Tiltem. t. 5, p. 573.
THIS saint was a Cilician, of a senatorian family
in Anazarbus, and a minister of the gospel. In the persecution of
Dioclesian he fell into the hands of a judge, who, by his brutal
behavior, resembled more a wild beast than a man. The president,
seeing his constancy proof against the sharpest torments, hoped to
overcome him by the long continuance of his martyrdom. He caused him
to be brought before his tribunal every day; sometimes he caressed
him, at other times threatened him with a thousand tortures. For a
whole year together he caused him to be dragged as a malefactor
through all the towns of Cilicia, imagining that this shame and
confusion might vanquish him: but it served only to increase the
martyr’s glory, and gave him an opportunity of encouraging in
the faith all the Christians of Cilicia by his example and
exhortations. He suffered every kind of torture. The bloody
executioners had torn his flesh, furrowed his sides, laid his bones
bare, and exposed his very bowels to view. Scourges, fire, and the
sword, were employed various ways to torment him with the utmost
cruelty. The judge saw that to torment him longer was laboring to
shake a rock, and was forced at length to own himself conquered by
condemning him to death: in which, however, he studied to surpass his
former cruelty. He was then at Ægea, a town on the sea-coast;
and he caused the martyr to be sewed up in a sack with scorpions,
serpents, and vipers, and so thrown into the sea. This was the Roman
punishment for parricides, the worst of malefactors, yet seldom
executed on them. Eusebius mentions, that St. Ulpian of Tyre suffered
a like martyrdom, being thrown into the sea in a leather sack,
together with a dog and an aspick. The sea gave back the body of our
holy martyr, which the faithful conveyed to Alexandria of Cilicia,
and afterwards to Antioch, where St. Chrysostom pronounced his
panegyric before his shrine. He eloquently sets forth how much these
sacred relics were honored; and affirms, that no devil could stand
their presence, and that men by them found a remedy for their bodily
distempers, and the cure of the evils of the soul.
The martyrs lost with joy their worldly honors,
dignity, estates, friends, liberty, and lives, rather than forfeit
for one moment their fidelity to God. They courageously bade defiance
to pleasures and torments, to prosperity and adversity, to life and
death, saying, with the apostle: Who shall separate us from the
love of Jesus Christ? Crowns, sceptres, worldly riches, and
pleasures, you have no charms which shall ever tempt me to depart in
the least tittle from the allegiance which I owe to God. Alarming
fears of the most dreadful evils, prisons, racks, fire, and death, in
every shape of cruelty, you shall never shake my constancy. Nothing
shall ever separate me from the love of Christ. This must be the
sincere disposition of every Christian. Lying protestations of
fidelity to God cost us nothing: but he sounds the heart. Is our
constancy such as to bear evidence to our sincerity, that rather than
to fail in the least duty to God, we are ready to resist to blood?
and that we are always upon our guard to keep our ears shut to the
voices of those syrens which never cease to lav snares to our senses?