{"collection":"chr","html_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/browse/chr/ecf/101/1010154.htm","path":"chr/ecf/101/1010154.htm","source_url":"https://sacred-texts.com/chr/ecf/101/1010154.htm","text":"Chapter XI.\u2014His Mother, Attacked by Fever, Dies at Ostia.\n27. What reply I made unto her to these things I do not well remember. However, scarcely five days after, or not much more, she was prostrated by fever; and while she was sick, she one day sank into a swoon, and was for a short time unconscious of visible things. We hurried up to her; but she soon regained her senses, and gazing on me and my brother as we stood by her, she said to us inquiringly, \u201cWhere was I?\u201d Then looking intently at us stupefied with grief, \u201cHere,\u201d saith she, \u201cshall you bury your mother.\u201d I was silent, and refrained from weeping; but my brother said something, wishing her, as the happier lot, to die in her own country and not abroad. She, when she heard this, with anxious countenance arrested him with her eye, as savouring of such things, and then gazing at me, \u201cBehold,\u201d saith she, \u201cwhat he saith;\u201d and soon after to us both she saith, \u201cLay this body anywhere, let not the care for it trouble you at all. This only I ask, that you will remember me at the Lord\u2019s altar, wherever you be.\u201d And when she had given forth this opinion in such words as she could, she was silent, being in pain with her increasing sickness.\n28. But, as I reflected on Thy gifts, O thou invisible God, which Thou instillest into the hearts of Thy faithful ones, whence such marvellous fruits do spring, I did rejoice and give thanks unto Thee, calling to mind what I knew before, how she had ever burned with anxiety respecting her burial-place, which she had provided and prepared for herself by the body of her husband. For as they had lived very peacefully together, her desire had also been (so little is the human mind capable of grasping things divine) that this should be added to that happiness, and be talked of among men, that after her wandering beyond the sea, it had been granted her that they both, so united on earth, should lie in the same grave. But when this uselessness had, through the bounty of Thy goodness, begun to be no longer in her heart, I knew not, and I was full of joy admiring what she had thus disclosed to me; though indeed in that our conversation in the window also, when she said, \u201cWhat do I here any longer?\u201d she appeared not to desire to die in her own country. I heard afterwards, too, that at the time we were at Ostia, with a maternal confidence she one day, when I was absent, was speaking with certain of my friends on the contemning of this life, and the blessing of death; and when they\u2014amazed at the courage which Thou hadst given to her, a woman\u2014asked her whether she did not dread leaving her body at such a distance from her own city, she replied, \u201cNothing is far to God; nor need I fear lest He should be ignorant at the end of the world of the place whence He is to raise me up.\u201d On the ninth day, then, of her sickness, the fifty-sixth year of her age, and the thirty-third of mine, was that religious and devout soul set free from the body.","title":"Nicene and Post Nicene-Fathers, Vol. I: The Confessions: ...","type":"page"}