"Blessed are you, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you, for my sake. Rejoice, and be exceeding glad, because your reward is very great in heaven; for so they persecuted the Prophets that were before you." --St. Matt, v., 11, 12. (From the Gospel for All Saints' Day.) I am about to preach you an old sermon this morning; but I doubt not, my dear friends, you will find it all the better for being old, and quite appropriate, moreover, to this day's feast, for it will carry us back to the earlier ages of Christianity, when living saints were more abundant than now. {177} In a vast desert of Palestine, which lay near the boundaries of Arabia, there dwelt, during the fourth century of the Christian era, a number of devout hermits, who, after a life of great innocence and saintly virtue, were cruelly massacred by the Saracens. Some of their brethren, deeply afflicted and scandalized by this outrage, began to ask themselves, how it was possible that God should permit such holy men to perish by the hand of these wicked infidels. In their perplexity, they deputed several of their number to visit and consult an aged Egyptian hermit who, on account of the great veneration in which he was held, and the number of disciples gathered around him, was called the Abba, or Abbot Theodore. These came to him with their sad story, and besought him to explain why God should permit such holy men to perish so miserably, and how he could consent to the triumph of these cruel barbarians over his saints.