While we run together to the observances of the venerable memory of our common father Eusebius, in honor of his confession, we render a religious service perpetually to the author of confessors. For whatever of devotion we expend toward God's elect, we display it wholly to God, who sanctifies His elect. And who would not venerate with full and perfect love the memories of the holy confessors, of whom our Lord and Savior says: 'He who shall confess me before men, I also will confess him before my Father, who is in heaven' (Matt. 10). It is therefore very salutary for us that we look up to the merits of blessed Eusebius, whom, for the recompense of faith kept, the coeternal Son confesses before the everlasting Father.
Consider therefore, dearly beloved, how great a glory it prepared for blessed Eusebius to have lived for Christ, and not to have feared death for Christ, as the Apostle says: 'For me to live is Christ, and to die is gain' (Phil. 1). Christ was assuredly his life, because walking along the path of the spiritual virtues, he knew not how to live without Christ. And to die was gain to him, because if by the loss of the present life he should pass out of the world, going to Christ, he knew that he would gain the riches of heaven. Whence this most glorious confessor both, while living, sought Christ the Lord, and, while dying, acquired Him. He sought Christ while living, when, keeping His saving precepts, he asserted the undivided unity of the Word with the Father.
He acquired Him while dying, when by the death of the body he passed over to the fellowship of His kingdom: and because he did not deny the one substance of the Father and the Son, as it is, he endured exile, prison, scourgings, hunger, and thirst. All which faithfully overcoming, he found the life which he loved; and triumphed over the death which he did not fear. For what else is it to trample upon death, than by living faithfully to possess life after death, and by dying with faith to hold forever the memory of a holy name? Behold, times give way to times; generations pass by in the succession of generations. But blessed Eusebius, transcending all the courses of our ages, is both perpetual in the confession of Christ, and continual in our devotion.
Nor indeed is there any doubt that both unfailing life accompanies him who lives piously and holily, and eternal honor follows after. This, brethren, is the venerable Eusebius, who, while by his faithful pilgrimage he defended the faith that was a pilgrim among the perfidious, tending toward the fatherland of true faith, merited the fellowship of the heavenly city. He was indeed driven from the Church by the hands of the wicked, but the most faithful man carried the Church with himself wherever he went. Or was not the Church in him, in whose catholic and most valiant breast the eternal author of the Church dwelt? But now let us see what contests the excellent confessor waged for the faith, and what labors he endured.
For he is said to have been shut up in such a penal dwelling that the house was shorter than the man, and the prison narrower than the prisoner, so that for him standing and lying in such a dungeon it was a deadly torment, that whatever of tortures the cruel torturer could exact from the holy body, this the narrows of that most wretched dwelling wrought. Above these he was afflicted with starvation and thirst, but the champion of the saving faith knew not to grow weary from the necessity of want. Eusebius knew not, I say, to be overcome by lack of food and drink, to whom the Word of God was living bread, and whom the Holy Spirit gave to drink, pouring down from above the dew of His abundance.
For what substance of soul or body could be lacking to him, who, having confessed the one and coeternal deity of the Almighty Father, and of His Only-begotten, and of the Holy Spirit, was suckled forever at the evangelical breasts of the Father? What then was lacking to the martyrdom of this man, who sweated through so many contests of martyrdom? There is added also to the increase of our joy, that likewise today is celebrated the birthday of the Maccabee brothers, whom a fruitful mother brought forth to God by a religious birth (2 Macc. 7), nourished with pious milk, and advanced with faithful upbringing:
so that it might appear that this most noble mother had bestowed on her offspring not only the nature of an earthly body, but also had infused into them the resolve of a heavenly spirit; and although the differing age in the brothers differed also in the variety of their limbs, yet in the confession of the divine name their concordant brotherhood knew not to be at variance. For which cause the wonderful woman rejoiced to lose her sons more gloriously than to have borne them. She, certain of the promises of her God, and secure of her faith, standing undaunted and unconquered amid the torments of her dying pledges, despised the life of her youngest son, even when the tyrant offered it, knowing that at the price of present death he would purchase the times of unending perennial life;
and the mother taught more praiseworthily that where God's honor is at stake, one's children ought not to be spared, that they may rightly be spared. Who would not, struck with all amazement, marvel at such a woman, who, forgetful of natural affection in the most bitter death of so many sons, kept her love unmoved toward God? But what shall I say of the most valiant youths, or by what speech above all shall it be told, of how great virtue and of how great faith it was, that they rather obeyed the mother urging them to death, than yielded to the king now inflicting wounds, now promising rewards? Wonderful indeed were the young men in their sufferings, but each one was pressed by his own torments.
But much more wonderful was the mother, who was able to persist unbending, when the torments of so many sons tortured her alike. For the first of them was fried on a heated pan; but rather the mother, burning in all her bowels with a native fire, was fried by affection. The head of another, as was read, was miserably laid bare, the skin with the hair torn off; but she, lest her son should be overcome by such punishments, as though bound by the hair from the crown, hung suspended by the fear of maternal tenderness. Another's tongue was cut off by the hands and steel of the perfidious in impiety; but against the raging tyrant the tongue of the mutilated son lived on more strongly in the mother. And what more, dearly beloved?
as the mother was afflicted with the torments of all her sons, so was she adorned with the victories of all, and slain by the gentile sword she departed by a desirable death; so that she who taught that one must die for God's honor, might herself honor God by her own fall. And therefore let us now exult with all joys, because a Maccabean offspring, for the defense of the ancestral law, and Eusebius, the assertor of evangelical truth, ever faithful to God, by his most blessed death, have consecrated this day for us unto all gladness.