“The might of that prayer, ‘Father, forgive them,’ had this result, that the hearts of many who said, ‘Let His blood be on us and our children,’ were converted by the preaching of Peter the Apostle, and in one day three thousand were baptized; and they all became of one heart and of one soul, and ready to die for Him Whose Crucifixion they had demanded. “He was not only wont to heal bodily infirmities, but the wounds of sickly souls, saying to the paralytic, ‘Son, be of good cheer, thy sins be forgiven thee.’ “For He, without any infirmities of sin, took on Him all the infirmities that come from sin; so that he lacked not the sensations of hunger and thirst, of sleep and weariness, of sorrow and weeping, and endured the cruelest pains, even to the extremity of death. For no one could be loosed from the entangling nets of mortality, unless He in Whom the nature of man was innocent allowed Himself to be put to death by the hands of the ungodly.” And again, lest that sacred season should become the mere commemoration of the dead, and not the communion of the living, Leo said—“We ought to honour the Lord’s Passover as present, rather than remember the Passover as passed.” Again—“He it is Who, making no exception of any nation, forms out of every nation under heaven one flock of holy sheep, and is daily performing what He has promised in the words, ‘And other sheep I have which are not of this fold, them also I must bring; and they shall hear My voice, and they shall be one flock and one Shepherd.’ “For although it is to blessed Peter in the first instance that He says, ‘Feed My sheep,’ yet the care of all the sheep actually belonging to all the shepherds is under the direction of the one Lord; and those who are on the rock He nourishes in such pleasant, well-watered pastures, that numberless sheep, strengthened with the fulness of love, hesitate not themselves to die for the name of the Shepherd, even as the Good Shepherd Himself was pleased to lay down His life for the sheep. He it is in Whom not only the glorious courage of martyrs has a share, but also the faith of all who are new-born. “The fiery sword by which the Land of Life was shut in has been quenched by the sacred blood of Christ. “Before the true Light the gloom of the old night has given way. The Christian people are invited to the riches of Paradise; and to all the regenerate has been laid open a path of return to the lost Fatherland, if only no one causes that way to be closed against himself, which could be opened to the faith of the robber.” Ethne’s thoughts went back to Dewi the pirate. So the forty days of the fast and the week of the Passion passed on, and the lives of Christians were gathered into the life and death of Christ; until at the close the grave voice of Leo, as a faithful leader of souls, led the people from the contemplation of the Sufferer into the fellowship of His sufferings.