“Blessed mother! blessed progeny!” he said. “The palms of these seven martyrs are multiplied sevenfold—the first suffering without the help of an example; the last tortured in all the tortures of the others; whilst each conquers in all, all have won the sevenfold crown of each.” And then—“The battle indeed,” he said, “never ceases for the Christian. Thou who dreamest that the days of persecution are past, that for thee there is no combat with the enemy, search into the recesses of thine own heart, and see if no tyrant seeks to rule in the citadel there. Make thou no truce with avarice; despise thou the increase of unjust gain; refuse thou any compact with pride; chase away enervating luxury; repel thou injustice; contend with falsehood. And when thou findest thy combats multiplied, do thou also, a follower of these martyrs, seek with them a multiplied victory. We die to sin when sins die in us; and men become dead to the world, not by the perishing of the senses, but by the death of vices. Let each of you be mindful that the Temple of God is founded in Himself.” Thus day by day and year by year Ethne and Marius, and all that little company of the Aventine, sought to keep their post in the great battle, contending in Rome against her tyrannies and miseries and sins, and making the plundered palace rich and beautiful again by gathering thither the orphans, the cripples, and the aged left destitute and forsaken by the sack of the Vandals; whilst among the Sabine hills they sought to bring freedom of soul to the slave, and the light of Christ to the lingering paganism of the peasants. And all the time they were upheld by the holy example, and inspired by the trumpet-calls of Leo, rebuking the careless, encouraging the desponding, reviving the faint, enkindling the foremost to press on further. Old Rome lived on, they felt, in Leo. His far-seeing eye reached from end to end of Christendom. His strong hand held the dissolving world and the distracted Church together. His great life-battle was indeed drawing to a close. Underneath the vague Pantheisms from the East, brought into the West, into Rome and Spain, through Manicheans and Priscillians, he had detected the corruption of moral life, the relaxing of all the ties of duty and loyalty, and had fought against them to the death, not indeed gently either in word or deed.