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IN the district of Palestine near the village of Tekoa which had the
honour of producing the prophet Amos, there is a vast desert which
stretches far and wide as far as Arabia and the dead sea, into which the
streams of Jordan enter and are lost, and where are the ashes of Sodom. In
this district there lived for a long while monks of the most perfect life
and holiness, who were suddenly destroyed by an incursion of Saracen
robbers: whose bodies we knew were seized upon with the greatest
veneration both by the Bishops of the neighbourhood and by the whole
populace of Arabia, and deposited among the relics of the martyrs, so that
swarms of people from two towns met, and made terrible war upon each other,
and in their struggle actually came to blows for the possession of the holy
spoil, while they strove among themselves with pious zeal as to which of
them had the better claim to bury them and keep their relics -- the one
party boasting of their vicinity to the place of their abode, the other of
the fact that they were near the place of their birth. But we were upset by
this and being disturbed either on our own account or on account of some of
the brethren who were in no small degree scandalized at it, inquired why
men of such illustrious merits and of so great virtues should be thus slain
by robbers, and why the Lord permitted such a crime to be committed against
his servants, so as to give up into the hands of wicked men those who were
the admiration of everybody: and so in our grief we came to the holy
Theodore, a man who excelled in practical common sense. For he was living
in Cellae, a place that lies between Nitria and Scete, and is five miles
distant from the monasteries of Nitria, and cut off by eighty intervening
miles of desert from the wilderness of Scete where we were living. And when
we had made our complaint to him about the death of the men mentioned
above, and expressed our surprise at the great patience of God, because He
suffered men of such worth to be killed in this way, so that those who
ought to be able by the weight of their sanctity to deliver others from
trials of this kind, could not save themselves from the hands of wicked men
(and asked) why it was that God allowed so great a crime to be committed
against his servants, then the blessed Theodore replied.
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