The day must dawn, and darksome night be past;
All journeys end in welcomes to the weary,
And heaven, the heart’s true home, will come at last.”
The promise of Basiliscus was literally fulfilled—he was buried in the same grave with the martyr, in the presence of a large concourse of monks and nuns.[663]
The enemies of Chrysostom thus succeeded in wreaking their vengeance to the full upon the person of their victim—“Non missura cutem, nisi plena cruoris hirudo;” but they were powerless to obliterate his memory. A sense of the cruelty and injustice with which he had been treated grew throughout Christendom, and he was more honoured and admired after his death than he had been during his life. His followers in Constantinople, under the appellation of Johnites, persisted in refusing to hold any communion with Atticus; and in the course of ten years, Atticus himself was constrained, by the solicitations of the Court and people, by the example of other prelates, especially Alexander of Antioch, and by a natural desire to maintain communion with the Western Church, to admit the name of Chrysostom into the diptychs of the Church of Constantinople. Cyril, the nephew and successor of Theophilus, who inherited in too many points his uncle’s spirit as well as his see, yielded a more tardy and reluctant consent to the recognition of his uncle’s foe.[664]
But a still higher honour was yet to be paid to his memory by the Church from which he had been so violently expelled. In A.D. 434, Proclus, formerly a disciple of Chrysostom, was elevated to the see of Constantinople. He conceived that the only effectual means of doing justice to the injured saint, and reconciling the Johnites to the Church, would be to transport his remains to the city. The consent of the Emperor Theodosius II. was obtained. On January 27,[665] A.D. 438, the reliques of the banished Archbishop were brought to the shores of the Bosporus. As once before in his lifetime, to greet him on his return from exile, so now, and in still greater numbers, the people, bearing torches, crowded the waters of the strait with their boats to welcome the return of all which remained of their beloved and much-wronged spiritual father. The young Emperor, stooping down, laid his face on the reliquary, and implored forgiveness of the injuries which his parents had inflicted on the saint whose ashes it contained. That reliquary was then deposited near the altar of the Church of the Apostles.[666] It is the sad story, so often repeated in history, of goodness and greatness, unrecognised, slighted, injured, cut short in a career of usefulness by one generation, abundantly, but too late, acknowledged in the next; when posterity, paying to the memory and the tomb the honours which should have been bestowed on the living man, can only utter the remorseful prayer—
“His saltem accumulem donis, et fungar inani
Munere....”