By the authority of the Ambrosian codex, Muratori attributed to Saint Maximus the following two sermons on the holy martyrs Alexander, Martyrius, and Sisinnius. These Gallandi afterward published in vol. IX of the Library of the ancient Fathers. Although we admire with fitting honor all the blessed martyrs whom antiquity hands down to us, yet especially the holy Alexander, Martyrius, and Sisinnius, who suffered in our own times, we ought to receive with all veneration. For, I know not by what bond, we have a greater affection for those whom our own conscience knows than for those whom history teaches. For those we know to have been martyrs by reading; these, by the contemplation of our eyes.
The passions of those we learn by the report of rumor; the torments of these we grasp by the testimony of the face. Greater affection, therefore, I owe there, where opinion exhorts my belief. Greater affection, I say, I owe there, where, through the things which I have seen, I am compelled the more devoutly to believe also those things which I have not seen. For when certain things I had heard seemed to me impossible, I began to believe that they could have happened, while I beheld like things to have been done. And therefore the passion of our own time has bestowed this upon us, that it both confers the grace of the present and confirms the faith of the past. The aforesaid blessed men, therefore, we ought to receive with all veneration, first because they deigned to illustrate the days of our life with their precious blood;
then, because they conferred upon us no small prerogative before God, showing what sort of faith there was among Christians in our own age, from whose fellowship they merited to arise as martyrs. Thirdly, because these same men were of so holy a manner of life that they found the crown of martyrdom in a time of peace. For when no persecuting king pressed upon them, no sacrilegious tyrant insisted, it was not public persecution that made them confessors, but Christian devotion.
For when, in the region of Anaunia, having built a church at their own expense, they were presiding over its holy altar—since indeed one of them discharged the office of the diaconate, and two that of the clergy—and the men of that region, among whom the Christian name had not previously been known, by their accustomed sacrilege, which they call a lustration, wished to pollute all the places, and the holy men rebuked them and manifestly convicted their errors with reasonable correction, then those men, inebriated more by fury than by wine, seized them, and wounded them with most cruel slaughter, so that one of them, after many torments, awaited half-alive and beheld the end of his own death;
for, having destroyed the fabric of the church, building a pyre from its beams, they delivered the blessed bodies to the flames. Truly blessed bodies, which the deadly fire took not for the punishment of an idol, but which the holy flame received unto the rest of the Lord's house. A holy flame indeed, which therefore received the martyrs, not that it might consume them with harmful burning, but that it might keep sacrilegious hands off them. But by such a burning the inward parts of the blessed were consecrated, not cremated. To this passion applies what the Apostle says: But he himself shall be saved, yet so as by fire (1 Corinthians 3). For these were made safe, while by the burning of their venerable confession they were consumed together.
This, then, brethren, is the whole cause of their passion, on account of which the holy men, condemned to death, would exhort the rest to be like them in their course: for their exhortation availed to such a degree that, when they departed from this world, their faith pervaded all the places of that very region. So Christ, where then in three martyrs he suffered persecution, now there exults in the many peoples of the Christians.