Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 23, 2025
"The name my mother gave me is Andre; but when I came to be a deacon in our Bielo-Osero, Father Hilarion, who presided at the raising, asked me how I wished to be known in the priesthood, and I answered him, Sergius.
Antony or St. Hilarion, and he may certainly experience a most distressing revulsion of feeling, —not that his reason really deduces any thing from his much loved studies contrary to the faith, but that his imagination is bewildered, and swims with the sense of the ineffable distance of that faith from the view of things which is familiar to him, with its strangeness, and then again its rude simplicity, as he considers it, and its apparent poverty contrasted with the exuberant life and reality of his own world.
And they went to and fro, carrying garlands and strewing flowers, so that, although mid-winter, it was like a garden in June, so sweet of roses, and lilies, and gillyflowers. And the angels sang; and when they had finished their work, they said, "It is well," and departed, holding hands and flying into the sky above the fir-trees. And Hilarion wondered greatly, and said five Paters and six Aves.
Epiphanius, bishop of Salamina in Cyprus, who had much intercourse with Hilarion, has written his praise in a short epistle, which is commonly read, yet it is one thing to praise the dead in general phrases, another to relate his special virtues.
So strong is the instinctive tendency of man to association, that even communities of madmen may organize. Hilarion is said to have been the first who established a monastic community. He went into the desert when he was only fifteen years old. Eremitism thus gave birth to Coenobitism, and the evils of solitude were removed.
And, lo! in the middle of the night the ass brayed and the ox bellowed, and Hilarion started up. And he saw the heavens open with a great brightness as of beaten and fretted gold, and angels coming and going, and holding each other by the hand, and wreathed in roses, and singing "Gloria in Excelsis Deo, et in terra pax hominibus bonæ voluntatis."
At length she asked: "Have you heard from Father Hilarion?" "Not yet," Sergius replied. "I was thinking of him," she continued. "He used to tell me of the primitive church the Church of the Disciples. One of his lessons returns to me. He seems to be standing where you are. I hear his voice. I see his countenance.
Before beginning to write the life of the blessed Hilarion, I invoke the Holy Spirit which dwelt in him, that, as he largely bestowed virtues on Hilarion, he may give to me speech wherewith to relate them; so that his deeds may be equalled by my language.
"Your Greek, good Sergius, is excellent; yet I did not understand the words with which you concluded." "I beg pardon," he replied, with a change of countenance. "In my mother's tongue I repeated a saying of the Psalmist, which you shall have voice and look as Father Hilarion has given it to me oftener than I am days old."
Hearing, then, that the holy Hilarion was passing by for he had often cured Saracens possessed with daemons they came out to meet him in crowds, with their wives and children, bowing their necks, and crying in the Syrian tongue, 'Barech! that is, 'Bless! He received them courteously and humbly, entreating them to worship God rather than stones, and wept abundantly, looking up to heaven, and promising them that, if they would believe in Christ, he would come oftener to them.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking