miraculous effects of his intercession with God in their behalf. Footnotes: 1. Primiscrinius. 2. Ep. 180. 3. On Catacombs, see in St. Calixtus, Oct. 14. 4. Chatelain, notes, p. 355. Baillet. 5. Bollandus, Chatel. ib. ST. EUTHYMIUS, ABBOT. From his life, faithfully written forty years after his death, by Cyril of Scythopolis, a monk of his monastery, one of the best writers of antiquity, and author of the life of St. Sabas. See it accurately published by Dom Lottin, Annal. Graec. t. 1, and Cotelier, Mon. Graec. t. 2, p. 200. A.D. 473. THE birth of this saint was the fruit of the prayers of his pious parents, through the intercession of the martyr Polyeuctus. His father was a noble and wealthy citizen of Melitene in Armenia. Euthymius was educated in sacred learning, and in the fervent practice of prayer, silence, humility, and mortification, under the care of the holy bishop of that city, who ordained him priest, and constituted him his vicar and general-overseer of the monasteries. The saint often visited that of St. Polyeuctus, and spent whole nights in prayer on a neighboring mountain; as he also did all the time from the octave of the Epiphany till towards the end of Lent. The love of solitude daily growing stronger in his breast, he secretly left his own country,{186} at twenty-nine years of age: and, after offering up his prayers at the holy places in Jerusalem, chose a cell six miles from that city, near the Laura[1] of Pharan. He made baskets, and procured, by selling them, both his own subsistence and alms for the poor. Constant prayer was the employment of his soul. After five years he retired with one Theoctistus, a holy hermit, ten miles further towards Jericho, where they lived together on raw herbs in a cave. In this place he began to receive disciples, about the year 411. He committed the care of his monastery to Theoctistus, and continued himself in a remote hermitage, only giving audience on Saturdays and Sundays, to those who desired spiritual advice. He taught all his monks never to eat so much as to satisfy their hunger, but strictly forbade among them all singularity in fasts, or any other common observances, as savoring of vanity and self-will. According to his example, they all retired into the deserts from the octave of the feast of the Epiphany till the week before Easter, when they met again in their monastery, to celebrate the office peculiar to Holy Week. He enjoined them constant silence and manual labors: they gained their own subsistence, and a surplus, which they devoted as first-fruits to God in the relief of the poor.