Ep. CLII.
(On his retirement from Constantinople Gregory had at
the request of the Bishops of the Province, and especially of Theodore
of Tyana the Metropolitan, and Bosporius Bishop of Colonia (see letters
above) and at the earnest solicitation of the people, undertaken the
charge of the Diocese of Nazianzus; but he very soon found that his
health was not equal to so great a task, and that he could not fulfil
its calls upon him. He struggled on for some time, but at length,
finding himself quite unequal to it, he wrote as follows to the
Metropolitan:)
It is time for me to use these words of Scripture,
To whom shall I cry when I am wronged?
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Who will stretch out a hand to me when
I am oppressed? To whom shall the burden of this Church pass, in
its present evil and paralysed condition? I protest before God
and the Elect Angels that the Flock of God is being unrighteously dealt
with in being left without a Shepherd or a Bishop, through my being
laid on the shelf. For I am a prisoner to my ill health and have
been very quickly removed thereby from the Church, and made quite
useless to everybody, every day breathing my last, and getting more and
more crushed by my duties. If the Province had any other head, it
would have been my duty to cry out and protest to it continually.
But since Your Reverence is the Superior, it is to you I must
look. For, to leave out everything else, you shall learn from my
fellow-priests, Eulalius the Chorepiscopus
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and Celeusius, whom I have specially sent to Your Reverence, what these
robbers
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who have now got
the upper hand, are both doing and threatening. To repress them
is not in the power of my weakness, but belongs to your skill and
strength; since to you, with His other gifts God has given that of
strength also for the protection of His Church. If in saying and
writing this I cannot get a hearing, I shall take the only course
remaining to me, that of publicly proclaiming and making known that
this Church needs a Bishop, in order that it may not be injured by my
feeble health. What is to follow is matter for your
consideration.
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Hab. ii. 1
.
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Chorepiscopi;—a
grade of clergy called into existence in the latter part of the Third
Century, first in Asia Minor, to meet the difficulty of providing
Episcopal supervision in the country districts of large Dioceses.
They seemed to have been allowed to confer the Minor, but not the Holy
Orders, unless by special commission from the Diocesan, on the ground
of their lack of original Jurisdiction. That they were originally
possessed of full Episcopal Orders there can be no doubt, but
eventually the position was allowed to be held by Priests, and in the
West the office became practically merged in that of the
Archdeacon.
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The Apollinarians.