Encouragement for modern times

Take heart brothers and sister.  From the beginning of the Church, The Church has felt deeply the struggle against the twisting of Christ's message and the Church He left behind.  I found this passage from St. Eusebius very encouraging.  Note:  He wrote his history just after Christianity became the approved religion in the Rome Empire.

 I hope it helps others out there, too.  I highly recommend Eusebius' 'History of the Church' as reading material for Lent.  It makes me glad I live in modern America.  Right now anyway, we can not be persecuted like Catholics were in the first 3 centuries after the Pentecost.

"But this propaganda brought...no lasting success, for Truth asserted herself, and with the march of time shone with increasing light. For by her activity the machinations of her foes were promptly shown up and extinguished, though one after another new heresies were invented, the earlier ones constantly passing away and disappearing, in different ways at different times, into forms of every shape and character. But the splendour of the Catholic and only true Church, always remaining the same and unchanged, grew steadily in greatness and strength, shedding on every race of Greeks and non-Greeks alike the majestic, spotless, free, sober, pure light of her inspired citizenship and philosophy.  Thus the passage of time extinguished the calumnies against the whole of our doctrine, and our teaching remained alone, everywhere victorious and acknowledged as supreme in dignity and sobriety, in divine and philosophic doctrines, so that no one today could dare to subject our Faith to vile abuse or o any such misrepresentation as in the past those who conspired against us were in the habit of doing."

--Eusebius, "The History of the Church (from Christ to Constantine)", pg. 110 (London: Penguin Books, trans. c. 1965, Rev. 1988), trans. G.A. Williamson.

Picture:  Reliquary of St. Eusebius