No. 1512.)
To Thomas all things yield and are obedient:
Plagues, diseases, death, and devils, {213}
Fire, air, land, and seas.
Thomas filled the world with glory.
The world offers obeisance to Thomas[77].
[Footnote 77:
Thomae cedunt et parent omnia:
Pestes, morbi, mors, et daemonia,
Ignis, aer, tellus, et maria.
Thomas mundum replevit gloria.
Thomae mundus praestat obsequia.
]
_Eighth Lesson._
In good truth, the holy Thomas, the precious champion of God, was to be
worthily glorified. For if the cause, yea, forasmuch as the cause makes
the martyr, did ever a title of holy martyrs exist more glorious?
Contending for the Church, in the Church he suffered; in a holy place,
at the holy time of the Lord's nativity, in the midst of his
fellow-priests and the companies of the religious: since in the agony of
the prelate all the circumstances seemed so to concur, as perpetually to
illustrate the title of the sufferer, and reveal the wickedness of his
persecutors, and stain their name with never-ending infamy. But so did
the divine vengeance rage against the persecutors of the martyr, that in
a short time, being carried away from the midst, they nowhere appeared.
And some, without confession, or the viaticum, were suddenly snatched
away; others tearing piecemeal their own fingers or tongues; others
pining with hunger, and corrupting in their whole body, and racked with
unheard-of tortures before their death, and broken up by paralysis;
others bereft of their intellects; others expiring with madness;--left
manifest proofs that they were suffering the penalty of unjust
persecution and premeditated murder.
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