ed, but to cut my throat with a
sword. Even to the present time I stand face to face with this
danger, fearing the sword which threatens my neck so that I can
scarcely draw a free breath between one meal and the next. Even so
do we read of him who, reckoning the power and heaped-up wealth of
the tyrant Dionysius as a great blessing, beheld the sword secretly
hanging by a hair above his head, and so learned what kind of
happiness comes as the result of worldly power (Cicer. 5, Tusc.)
Thus did I too learn by constant experience, I who had been exalted
from the condition of a poor monk to the dignity of an abbot, that
my wretchedness increased with my wealth; and I would that the
ambition of those who voluntarily seek such power might be curbed
by my example.

And now, most dear brother in Christ and comrade closest to me in
the intimacy of speech, it should suffice for your sorrows and the
hardships you have endured that I have written this story of my own
misfortunes, amid which I have toiled almost from the cradle. For
so, as I said in the beginning of this letter, shall you come to
regard your tribulation as nought, or at any rate as little, in
comparison with mine, and so shall you bear it more lightly in
measure as you regard it as less. Take comfort ever in the saying
of Our Lord, what he foretold for his followers at the hands of the
followers of the devil: "If they have persecuted me, they will also
persecute you (John xv, 20). If the world hate you, ye know that it
hated me before it hated you. If ye were of the world, the world
would love his own" (ib. 18-19). And the apostle says: "All that
will live godly in Christ Jesus shall suffer persecution" (II Tim.
iii, 12). And elsewhere he says: "I do not seek to please men. For
if I yet pleased men, I should not be the servant of Christ"
(Galat. i, 10). And the Psalmist says: "They who have been pleasing
to men have been confounded, for that God hath despised them."

Commenting on this, St. Jerome, whose heir methinks I am in the
endurance of foul slander, says in his letter to Nepotanius: "The
apostle says: 'If I yet pleased men, I should not be the servant of
Christ.' He no longer seeks to please men, and so is made Christ's
servant" (Epist. 2). And again, in his letter to Asella regarding
those whom he was falsely accused of loving: "I give thanks to my
God that I am worthy to be one whom the world hates" (Epist. 99).
And to the monk Heliodorus he writes: "You