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Works Cyprian of Carthage (200-258) De mortalitate On the Mortality
Part Ia

3.

For it is written that the just lives by faith. 1 If you are just, and live by faith, if you truly believe in Christ, why, since you are about to be with Christ, and are secure of the Lord's promise, do you not embrace the assurance that you are called to Christ, and rejoice that you are freed from the devil? Certainly Simeon, that just man, who was truly just, who kept God's commands with a full faith, when it had been pledged him from heaven that he should not die before he had seen the Christ, and Christ had come an infant into the temple with His mother, acknowledged in spirit that Christ was now born, concerning whom it had before been foretold to him; and when he had seen Him, he knew that he should soon die. Therefore, rejoicing concerning his now approaching death, and secure of his immediate summons, he received the child into his arms, and blessing the Lord, he exclaimed, and said, "Now lettest Thou Thy servant depart in peace, according to Thy word; for mine eyes have seen Thy salvation;" 2 assuredly proving and bearing witness that the servants of God then had peace, then free, then tranquil repose, when, withdrawn from these whirlwinds of the world, we attain the harbour of our home and eternal security, when having accomplished this death we come to immortality. For that is our 3 peace, that our faithful tranquillity, that our stedfast, and abiding, and perpetual security.


  1. [To live by faith = to be just, through Christ the object of faith. The Fathers always accept "justification by faith." See Faber's Primitive Doctrine of Justification; and compare Bull, Harmonia Apostolica.] ↩

  2. Luke ii. 29. ↩

  3. Baluzius interpolates here, without authority, "true." ↩

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On the Mortality
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Faculty of Theology, Patristics and History of the Early Church
Miséricorde, Av. Europe 20, CH 1700 Fribourg

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