The occasion requires, beloved, that we say a few things about the authority of vigils, about their antiquity, and about their very usefulness: for any labour is the more gladly undertaken if the usefulness of the labour itself be set before one's eyes. Ancient is the devotion of vigils, a good familiar to all the saints. Isaiah the prophet, in short, cries out to the Lord, saying: From the night my spirit watcheth unto thee, O God, for thy precepts are a light upon the earth (Isa. 26:9, acc. to LXX). David, sanctified both with the royal and the prophetic spirit by the anointing, so sings: O Lord God of my salvation, I have cried in the day, and in the night before thee (Ps. 87:2). Likewise he says: I have remembered thy name in the night, O Lord, and have kept thy law (Ps. 118:55).
Receive another utterance of the same prophet, which shows both the time and the posture of one praying: In the nights, he says, lift up your hands unto the holy place, and bless the Lord (Ps. 133:2). And lest you think that only the evening hours are called 'nights,' he meets you and says: At midnight I rose to give thanks to thee for the judgments of thy justice (Ps. 118:62). Behold, you have both the time expressed and the diligence of rising shown, how you should give thanks to God. As I yet consider the intent of the saints, something greater and more laborious occurs to me, and is suggested beyond the condition of human nature, when you hear the same prophet thus chanting: If I shall go up into the bed of my couch;
if I shall give sleep to my eyes, and slumber to my eyelids, or rest to my temples, until I find a place for the Lord, a tabernacle for the God of Jacob (Ps. 131:3-5). Who would not be astonished at so great a devotion of soul in the love of God, that he utterly denied himself sleep—without which human bodies certainly fail—until the king and prophet should find a place and temple to be built for the Lord? Which thing ought strongly to admonish us, that, if we ourselves wish to be a place of God, and desire to be held perpetually as his tabernacle and temple, as the apostle Paul asserts, saying: You are the temple of God (2 Cor. 6:16): we may, as far as we can, by the example of the saints love the vigils, lest it be said also of us:
They have slept their sleep, and have found nothing (Ps. 75:6): but rather let each of you say with thanksgiving: In the day of my tribulation I sought God, with my hands in the night before him, and I was not deceived (Ps. 76:3). For it is good to give thanks to the Lord, and to sing to thy name, O Most High; to declare thy mercy in the morning, and thy truth through the night (Ps. 91:2,3). These and such things, so great and so excellent, those saints sang and left in writing, that we who come after might be roused by examples like theirs, to celebrate even by night the watches of our salvation. But let us pass from the ancients to the new;
from the ministers of the Law to the ministers of the Gospel, that the grace of vigils may be sealed also from the New Testament. Anna, daughter of Phanuel, a widow serving with continual prayers and fastings, departed not from the temple day and night. In the Gospel it is read that those most holy shepherds, while keeping their nightly watches over their flock, both merited to see the angels in splendour, and to be the first to hear that Christ was born on earth. But indeed, does not the Saviour's own institution rouse all his hearers to watchfulness, whether in teaching by the parable of the good sower: While men slept, the enemy came and oversowed tares among the wheat, and went away (Matt. 13:25). And had they watched, the enemy could perhaps not even have sown the tares.
Or when he says: Let your loins be girt, and your lamps burning; and you yourselves like men who wait for their lord, when he shall return from the wedding. Blessed are those servants whom the lord, when he comes, shall find watching (Luke 12:35-37): And if he come, he says, in the evening hour, or at midnight, or at cockcrow, and find them watching, they are blessed (Mark 13:35). Therefore you also be ready, for at an hour you know not the Son of Man will come (Matt. 24:44). Nor did he teach watchfulness by words only, but confirmed it also by example. For the Gospel testifies that Jesus was passing the night in the prayer of God (Luke 6:12). He passed the night not for himself, but that we might know what all ought to do.
And he himself rebukes Peter at the time of the Passion, saying: Could you not watch one hour with me? And to all he now says: Watch and pray, lest you enter into temptation (Matt. 26:40,41). These words, with such an example, I beseech you, whom could they not avail to raise up even from the deep of death in like manner? Instructed by these discourses, confirmed by these proofs, the blessed Apostles also themselves watched, and commanded vigils. The apostle Peter is roused by an angel in prison at night, and, the angel himself opening the iron gate, he comes into the house of Mary, where many were gathered together, not sleeping certainly, but praying. The same man sets it down in his Epistle, and says:
Be sober and watch, for your adversary the devil, like a roaring lion, goes about seeking whom he may devour (1 Pet. 5:8). Paul and Silas, praying in the public prison about midnight, are recorded to have spoken a hymn while the prisoners listened (Acts 16:25); whereupon suddenly an earthquake occurred, and the foundations of the prison were shaken, and the doors were opened, and the chains of all were straightway loosed. Likewise the blessed apostle Paul exhorts the Thessalonians concerning the keeping of vigils, saying: Watch, and stand fast in the faith, be strengthened and act manfully (1 Cor. 16:13).