Not only in the four Cassinese codices just praised, and in the Ambrosian, is this second sermon on the Maccabees, inscribed to Saint Maximus, read, but also in Vatican 6451, fol. 151 verso, in these words: Sermon of Saint Maximus the bishop, on the Kalends of August, of the holy Maccabees. That the Spirit of the New and of the Old Testament is one, the magnanimity and faith of the Maccabees also declares, who, secure of the glory of eternity, God promising it, conquered by a holy death the savagery of a bloody king. For that our Lord Jesus Christ, whom, on the testimony of the Gospel, well-nigh all the gentile world believes to have come from heaven, was to be born on earth of a virgin, all Judea had long since been learning through the law and the prophets.
And hence it is, most beloved, that the Maccabee brothers, for reverence of their ancestral law, subjected themselves to sufferings before the Lord of the law suffered. Hence, that they despised death before hell was conquered through Christ. Hence, that they gave their own blood for the honor of the Redeemer, before the Redeemer poured out his own gore for them. But who would doubt that they could neither have approached nor endured so countless evils of the present world, unless with fullest faith they had believed in the good things of the age to come? No one, brethren, no one despises a tyrant, except he who is lifted up by the hope of a lawful emperor; no one prefers death to life, except he who believes there is life after death;
no one willingly endures torments, except he who hopes for rewards after the torments. Therefore, when Antiochus raged against the servants of God with unbridled madness, he orders the most religious choir of seven brothers to be brought to his tribunal with their mother, so that either she, tortured by the punishments of so numerous an offspring, might be overcome, or, if perchance his own destruction did not terrify some one of the boys, the death of a brother might trouble him. But the madman erred, being ignorant of the strength of religion, in which this above all is piety: to have preferred God to brothers, God to sons, God to parents. He commanded them, therefore, against the heavenly decrees, to eat swine's flesh, and to those who refused he applies various kinds of punishments. But the hearts of the faithful know not how to yield to the wills of the faithless.
It is dealt with them, therefore, by sword, by flames, and by various punishments. This one's head is stripped of its skin, this one's tongue is cut off; another is fried, having his hands and feet cut off. But amid the hands of the tormentors, so deadly, neither does the affection of the mother standing by bend the sons, nor does the throng of dying children break the mother. And thus in the brother-boys, and in the most aged woman, there were the same vows of dying for the law of God, so that she too may seem to have begotten her sons more by spirit than by flesh, and they may be reckoned to have sucked from their mother not so much the substance of milk as of faith. Who among the faithless and the faithful would not marvel that a most aged woman does not bewail the destruction of so many sweet pledges?
Who would not be astounded that, over such cruel torments of her sons, the joyful mother insults the raging king, and rather that persecutor is tormented by her magnanimity, whom by her impious meditation he had thought either to defile by prevarication or to punish by bereavement? For, what is above all wonder, to her youngest son, whom she had received from the king to be induced, the mother speaks thus: I beseech thee, my son, that, made worthy of thy brothers, thou receive death, that in that mercy of God I may receive thee back together with thy brothers (2 Maccabees 7). Truly the incomparable faith of the most glorious woman! She stands in the sight of the king, secure concerning the dead, trembling concerning the living. For she knew she would lose this her son alone, if he alone had feared to be slain.
But the young man was not degenerate, who had patiently beheld the agonies of his brothers, and gladly listened to his mother, and not only did not fear the king who tormented him, but rebuked the savage with a worthy reproach. And well, most beloved, did the marvelous woman, certain of the triumph of her sons, certain of the heavenly recompense, insult the king and exult in the Lord, since she then believed herself the more blessedly to be giving birth, when she saw her sons go before her to God by a glorious death. And Antiochus indeed multiplied the tortures: but the faithful old woman, against his multitude of temporal punishments, was reckoning the eternal rewards of her triumphant little ones, after whose fall, amid their sweetest bodies, she herself lay down by a longed-for and desirable death.
Nor was she terrified by any torments, she who had already conquered all kinds of torments in the inward parts of her sons. For she trembled not to be slain, who was hastening to that life to which she knew she had sent her pledges ahead.