The Tortures Failed Him

Cyprian to the elders and deacons, my brothers: greetings. [a]

I know, dearest brothers, that my letters have often urged you to take every care of those who have confessed the Lord with a glorious voice and are shut up in prison. Even so, I press it on you again and again: let nothing be lacking in the attention shown them, since nothing is lacking in their glory. I only wish that the place I am in and the office I hold would let me come and stand among them now. I would carry out every duty of love toward our bravest brothers promptly and gladly, in the ministry laid on me. So I beg you: let your own diligence stand in for the duty that is mine, and do everything that ought to be done for men whom God has thought worthy to make famous by such merits of faith and courage.

Let a keener watch and more care be given as well to the bodies of all those who were never tortured in prison and yet leave it by the glorious way out of death. For their courage and their honor are not too small for them to be joined to the blessed martyrs as well. So far as it lay with them, they bore everything they were ready and armed to bear. A man who has offered himself to torture and to death under the eyes of God has suffered everything he was willing to suffer. For it was not that he failed the tortures; the tortures failed him.

The Lord says, “Whoever confesses me before men, I too will confess him before my Father who is in heaven.” They have confessed him. And the Lord says, “The one who endures to the end will be saved.” They have endured, and have carried the merits of their courage through to the end, unspoiled and unstained. And again it is written, “Be faithful to the point of death, and I will give you the crown of life.” They kept their faithfulness, their steadiness, and their unbeaten strength to the point of death. When the ending of death is added to the willingness, and to the confession of the name made in prison and in chains, the martyr’s glory is complete.

One thing more: note the days on which they depart, so that we may keep their remembrance among the memorials of the martyrs. Tertullus does this already — our most faithful and devoted brother, who, besides all the other concern and care he shows the brothers in every kind of hard service, is not lacking in this either, the care of their bodies. He has written to me, and he keeps on writing and letting me know, the days on which our blessed brothers in prison pass through the gate of a glorious death into their immortality. Here we hold offerings and sacrifices for their remembrance, and soon, under the Lord’s protection, we will hold them together with you.

And let your care and your diligence not fail the poor either, as I have already written to you often — I mean those who stand firm in the faith, fight bravely alongside us, and have not left the camp of Christ. We owe them greater love and greater care now, precisely because poverty did not force them and the storm of persecution did not lay them flat; they go on serving faithfully with the Lord, and they have given the rest of the poor an example of faith.

I hope you are always well, brothers, dearly loved and greatly missed; and remember me. Greet the brotherhood in my name. Farewell.