Martin Gives Way, and an Angel Speaks to Him

“When Martin learned of this, he rushed to the palace, though it was already night. He promised that if these men were spared he would take communion with the bishops, provided only that the tribunes already sent into the Spanish provinces to destroy the churches were called back. Without delay Maximus granted everything he asked. The next day the ordination of Felix as bishop was being prepared. He was beyond doubt a man of great holiness and truly worthy of being made a priest in happier times. Martin took part in the communion of that day, judging it better to give way for the moment than to disregard the safety of those over whose heads a sword was hanging. Even so, although the bishops tried with all their might to get him to confirm his communion with them by signing his name, he could not be brought to do it. [a]

The following day he hurried away from that place. As he was on his way home, he was full of grief and lamentation that he had been mixed up even for an hour in that evil communion. Not far from a village named Andethanna, where remote woods stretch far and wide in deep solitude, he sat down while his companions went on a little ahead of him. There he fell into deep thought, by turns accusing and defending the cause of his grief and his own conduct. Suddenly an angel stood beside him and said, ‘You are right, Martin, to feel remorse, but you could not have escaped your difficulty any other way. Renew your strength, take up your courage again, or you will put at risk not only your good name now but your very salvation.’ So from that time on he carefully kept himself from being mixed up in communion with Ithacius’s party. But when it happened that he healed some of the possessed more slowly and with less grace than usual, he confessed to us at once with tears that he felt his power had lessened because of the evil of that communion, in which he had taken part for a moment out of necessity and not with his heart. He lived sixteen years after this, but he never again attended a synod, and he kept carefully away from all assemblies of bishops.