Epistle
XIV.—From His Fourth Festival Epistle.
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Love is altogether and for ever on the alert, and casts
about to do some good even to one who is unwilling to receive it.
And many a time the man who shrinks from it under a feeling of shame,
and who declines to accept services of kindness on the ground of
unwillingness to become troublesome to others, and who chooses rather
to bear the burden of his own grievances than cause annoyance and
anxiety to any one, is importuned by the man who is full of love to
bear with his aids, and to suffer himself to be helped by another,
though it might be as one sustaining a wrong, and thus to do a very
great service, not to himself, but to another, in permitting that other
to be the agent in putting an end to the ill in which he has been
involved.
926
ἐκ τῆς δ᾽
ἑορταστικῆς
ἐπιστολῆς
.
From the
Sacred Parallels of John of Damascus
, Works, ii. p. 753
C, edit. Paris, 1712. In his
Ecclesiastical History
, book
vii. ch. 20, Eusebius says: “In addition to these epistles,
the same Dionysius also composed others about this time, designated his
Festival Epistles
, and in these he says much in commendation of
the Paschal feast. One of these he addressed to Flavius, and
another to Domitius and Didymus, in which he gives the canon for eight
years, and shows that the Paschal feast ought not to be kept until the
passing of the vernal equinox. And besides these, he wrote
another epistle to his co-presbyters at Alexandria.”