15. Oh! how am I to count up all her traits,
or pass over most of them without injury to those who know them
not? Here however it is right to subjoin the rewards of her
piety, for indeed I take it that you, who knew her life well, have long
been eager and desirous to find in my speech not only things present,
or her joys yonder, beyond the conception and hearing and sight of man,
but also those which the righteous Rewarder bestowed upon her
here: a matter which often tends to the edification of
unbelievers, who from small things attain to faith in those which are
great, and from things which are seen to those which are not
seen. I will mention then some facts which are generally
notorious, others which have been from most men kept secret; and that
because her Christian principle made a point of not making a display of
her [Divine] favours. You know how her maddened mules ran away
with her carriage, and unfortunately overturned it, how horribly she
was dragged along, and seriously injured, to the scandal of unbelievers
at the permission of such accidents to the righteous, and how quickly
their unbelief was corrected: for, all crushed and bruised as she
was, in bones and limbs, alike in those exposed and in those out of
sight, she would have none of any physician, except Him Who had
permitted it; both because she shrunk from the inspection and the hands
of men, preserving, even in suffering, her modesty, and also awaiting
her justification from Him Who allowed this to happen, so that she owed
her preservation to none other than to Him: with the result that
men were no less struck by her unhoped-for recovery than by her
misfortune, and concluded that the tragedy had happened for her
glorification through sufferings, the suffering being human, the
recovery superhuman, and giving a lesson to those who come after,
exhibiting in a high degree faith in the midst of suffering, and
patience under calamity, but in a still higher degree the kindness of
God to them that are such as she. For to the beautiful promise to
the righteous “though he fall, he shall not be utterly
broken,” Ps. xxxvii. 24. has been added one
more recent, “though he be utterly broken, he shall speedily be
raised up and glorified.” Ib. cxlvi.
8 (LXX.). For
if her misfortune was
unreasonable, her recovery was extraordinary, so that health soon stole
away the injury, and the cure became more celebrated than the blow.