THE EPISTLE OF PASCHASIUS TO EUGIPIUS. To the holy lord, ever most dear, Eugipius the presbyter, Paschasius the deacon, a brother in Christ most dear. While, with the eloquence of your skill and the felicity of your leisure, weighing the bitternesses and the manifold occupations of sinners, you scorn to treat [this matter] yourself, I endure the loss of modesty out of regard for love. You have directed a memorandum, to which the eloquence of the skilled could add nothing;
and you have unlocked in a brief compendium a work which the whole Church might review, when you most truly set forth the life and character of blessed Severinus, who dwelt in the provinces of the Pannonians on their borders, and you handed down to the memory of posterity, to last for enduring times, the miracles which the divine power wrought through him. They know not that deeds perish along with the age, so that all may hold him present, and in a manner feel him to be dwelling among them, to whom the account of the reading shall reach. And therefore, because you have uttered more simply, and unfolded more easily, these things which you asked to be narrated by me, we have believed that nothing is to be added to your labor or to our zeal. For we narrate things heard in one way, but set forth things experienced in another.
The virtues of masters are more easily expounded by disciples (which are suggested more frequently by the conversation of teachers), [the hearts of saints] inspired by divine charisms being to be cultivated for honors. How much benefit the deeds of the saints impart, how much fervor they bestow, how much purity they instill—on this matter the authority of the apostolic voice, making it more widely known (I Pet. V): 'A pattern,' he says, 'of the flock'; and blessed Paul instructs Timothy (II Tim. II) to be a pattern to the faithful. Whence the same apostle (Heb. XI), weaving together with the greatest brevity a catalogue of the righteous, beginning from Abel, proceeds to recount the virtues of distinguished men.
Thus also that most faithful Mathathias, now drawing near to a most glorious death, distributed to his sons, by a hereditary right, the examples of the saints: that, stirred up more famously by their admirable contests, they might despise their own souls for the everlasting laws, with the fervor of holiness. Nor did the paternal instruction deceive the children. For so greatly did the deeds of the elders profit those who remembered them, that, armed with open faith, they deterred princes, overcame sacrilegious camps, far and wide tore down sacrilegious worship and the altars of demons, and, adorned with everlasting deeds, provided a civic crown for their splendid fatherland. Whence we too rejoice that something is provided by our brotherly ministry for the adornments of the bride of Christ:
not as though, I believe, in any times the more illustrious life of the elders has been lacking, but because it is fitting that the house of the great King should have the standards of very many trophies. For true virtue is not excluded by the multitude of the victorious, but is the more enlarged by desired successes.