‘Why should I not be sad, Pambo, my friend? Does not Solomon say that there is a time for mourning?’
‘True: but a time for mirth also.’
‘None to the penitent, burdened with the guilt of many sins.’
‘Recollect what the blessed Anthony used to say—“Trust not in thine own righteousness, and regret not that which is past.”’
‘I do neither, Pambo.’
‘Do not be too sure of that. Is it not because thou art still trusting in thyself, that thou dost regret the past, which shows thee that thou art not that which thou wouldst gladly pride thyself on being?’
‘Pambo, my friend,’ said Arsenius solemnly, ‘I will tell thee all. My sins are not yet past; for Honorius, my pupil, still lives, and in him lives the weakness and the misery of Rome. My sins past? If they are, why do I see rising before me, night after night, that train of accusing spectres, ghosts of men slain in battle, widows and orphans, virgins of the Lord shrieking in the grasp of barbarians, who stand by my bedside and cry, “Hadst thou done thy duty, we had not been thus! Where is that imperial charge which God committed to thee?”’.... And the old man hid his face in his hands and wept bitterly.
Pambo laid his hand again tenderly on the weeper’s shoulder.
‘Is there no pride here, my brother? Who art thou, to change the fate of nations and the hearts of emperors, which are in the hand of the King of kings? If thou wert weak, and imperfect in thy work—for unfaithful, I will warrant thee, thou wert never—He put thee there, because thou wert imperfect, that so that which has come to pass might come to pass; and thou bearest thine own burden only-and yet not thou, but He who bore it for thee.’
‘Why then am I tormented by these nightly visions?’