2.  Is the trial heavy, my brethren?  Let us endure the toil.  No one who shuns the blows and the dust of battle wins a crown.  Are those mockeries of the devil, and the enemies sent to attack us, insignificant?  They are troublesome because they are his ministers, but contemptible because God has in them combined wickedness with weakness.  Let us beware of being condemned for crying out too loud over a little pain.  Only one thing is worth anguish, the loss of one’s own self, when for the sake of the credit of the moment, if one can really call making a public disgrace of one’s self credit, one has deprived one’s self of the everlasting reward of the just.  You are children of confessors; you are children of martyrs; you have resisted sin unto blood. cf. Heb. xii. 4.  Use, each one of you, the examples of those near and dear to you to make you brave for true religion’s sake.  No one of us has been torn by lashes; κατεξάνθη.  cf. the use of καταξαίνω (=card or comb) in the Letter of the Smyrneans on the Martyrdom of Polycarp, § 2, “They were so torn by lashes that the mechanism of their flesh was visible, even as far as the veins and arteries.”  cf. note, p. 2, on the difference between the persecution of the Catholics by Valens and that of the earlier Christians by earlier emperors, though exile and confiscation were suffered in Basil’s time. no one of us has suffered confiscation of his house; we have not been driven into exile; we have not suffered imprisonment.  What great suffering have we undergone, unless peradventure it is grievous that we have suffered nothing, and have not been reckoned worthy of the sufferings of Christ? cf. Acts v. 41.  But if you are grieved because one whom I need not name occupies the house of prayer, and you worship the Lord of heaven and earth in the open air, remember that the eleven disciples were shut up in the upper chamber, when they that had crucified the Lord were worshipping in the Jews’ far-famed temple.  Peradventure, Judas, who preferred death by hanging to life in disgrace, proved himself a better man than those who now meet universal condemnation without a blush.