Eusebius of Caesarea · a new plain-English translation from the Greek
1| Constantine Augustus, to the assembly of the saints. The day of the Passion has come, a light more radiant than the day and the sun: the prelude to the resurrection, the new joining together of bodies that once labored, the anchor of the promise, and the path that leads to eternal life. It is here, most beloved teachers, and all you other men, my friends, and it is far more blessed than any other, both for the great multitude of worshipers and for the very God of our worship, who is addressed through the inner senses of each of them, as they sing his praise without ceasing in hymns and inspired words.
2| But you, Nature, mother of all, what have you ever accomplished for the world that can compare with this? What work is yours at all, if he is the cause of all things, and of your own essence as well? For it was he who set you in order, since the ornament of nature is a life lived according to nature. Yet what is contrary to nature prevailed beyond all measure: that no one should worship the God of all things as he deserves, and that all things should be thought to have come together not by providence but by chance, in disorder and confusion.
3| And this happened even though divine inspiration announced these things one by one through the prophets. When it was right to obey them, impious injustice resisted them with every kind of device, hostile to the light of truth and embracing the darkness that is hard to expose. Nor did it do even this without violence and cruelty, above all because the judgment of those in power lent its aid to the reckless rush of the common mobs, or rather took the lead in that untimely madness. So it was that such a way of life, entrenched through many generations, became the cause of the gravest evils for the people of that time. But as soon as the coming of the Savior shone forth, justice arose in place of unjust deeds, and calm out of every kind of storm, and everything that had been foretold through the prophets was fulfilled. Accordingly, when he had been lifted on high to his Father's hearth, having surrounded the world with the splendors of reverence and self-control, he founded the church upon the earth as a holy temple of virtue, everlasting and incorruptible, in which the worship owed to God the most high Father and the honors due to himself were performed with piety.
4| What, then, did the senseless wickedness of the nations contrive after this?
5| It set about driving out the gifts of Christ and laying waste the church that had been established for the salvation of all, and it restored its own superstition, so that once again factions, wars, battles, a perverse ordering of life, and the love of money, which is not even by nature peculiar to wickedness, might at one moment beguile people with gaudily decked-out hopes and at another strike them down with fear. But let it lie on the ground, defeated by virtue as is right, torn apart and convulsed by remorse. As for us, we must now speak of what belongs to the divine Word.
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