To the Martyrs 2

Other hindrances of the soul may likewise have escorted you as far as the prison threshold, as far as your relatives did too. From then on you were separated from the world itself; how much more from the age and its affairs? Nor let this dismay you, that you are separated from the world. For if we reflect that the world is rather the prison, we will understand that you have gone out of prison rather than into it. The world has greater darkness, which blinds people's hearts. The world puts on heavier chains, which bind people's very souls. The world breathes out worse filth: people's lusts. Finally, the world holds more accused: the whole human race. And it awaits judgment not from the proconsul but from God. So, blessed ones, consider yourselves transferred, if anything, from a prison to a place of safekeeping. It has darkness, but you yourselves are light. It has bonds, but you are free to God. It breathes out a foul smell, but you are a fragrance of sweetness. A judge is awaited, but you are going to judge the judges themselves. Let him be sad there who sighs for the fruit of the world. The Christian, even outside prison, has renounced the world, and in prison the prison as well. It makes no difference where you are in the world, you who are outside the world. And if you have lost some of life's joys, it is good business to lose something in order to gain greater things. I say nothing yet of the reward to which God invites the martyrs. Meanwhile let us compare the very way of life of the world and of the prison, and see whether the spirit does not gain more in prison than the flesh loses. Indeed, the flesh does not lose even what is due to it, through the care of the church and the love of the brothers, and the spirit besides obtains what is always useful to faith. You do not see foreign gods, you do not run into their images, you do not take part in the festival days of the heathen by the very mingling, you are not assailed by filthy fumes of sacrifice, you are not struck by the shouts of the shows, by the cruelty or frenzy or shamelessness of those celebrating them; your eyes do not stumble on the places of public lust; you are free from stumbling blocks, from temptations, from evil memories, and now even from persecution. The prison does for the Christian what the desert did for the prophets. The Lord himself very often went into seclusion, to pray more freely, to withdraw from the world; indeed, he showed his glory to his disciples in solitude. Let us take away the name of prison and call it a retreat. Though the body is shut in, though the flesh is detained, everything lies open to the spirit. Roam in spirit, walk about in spirit, setting before yourself not shady walks or long colonnades but that way which leads to God. As often as you walk it in spirit, so often you will not be in prison. The leg feels nothing in the stocks when the mind is in heaven. The mind carries the whole person about and transfers him wherever it wishes. “But where your heart is, there will your treasure be also.” There, then, let our heart be, where we wish to have our treasure.