The life of St Blaise of Sebaste
Among those he healed was a boy brought to him half dead with a fishbone caught fast in his throat. Blaise prayed over the child and the bone came free, and it is for this that the Church still keeps a blessing of the throat in his name.
When the persecution grew fierce he went out to a cave on the mountain to pray, and it was said that wild creatures came there and waited quietly for him to finish before he blessed them and sent them on their way, and that he mended the sick among them the same as he did for people. A widow once came to him weeping that a wolf had taken her only pig; he told her to be at peace, and the wolf came back and laid the animal down unharmed.
He was taken at last and put to torture, his flesh torn with iron combs of the kind used to card wool, and he could not be shaken. Seven women followed behind him as he was led back to his cell, gathering up what had fallen from his wounds, and for that they too were seized. Told to worship the idols, they asked first to wash them in the lake, and instead sank them in the deepest part of it, and were tortured for it afterward, their bodies made to shine white under what was done to them. One of them gave her two young sons into Blaise's keeping before the seven were beheaded. Tradition holds that Blaise and the two boys were beheaded soon after, under the emperor Licinius, around the year 316.
