The life of St John of Monembasia
His new master pressed him daily, by threats and by gentler temptations, to give up Christ for Islam, and would not let the boy be.
John's resolve was tested above all when, during the fast kept before the feast of the Dormition, his master shut him up and tried by hunger and cruelty to make him eat and break it; he would not, praying instead for strength to keep the fast whole. Starved for days afterward, he was visited by his own mother, who begged him to eat and only pretend to yield, so that she would not lose him too. He answered her gently that as a priest's son he owed the commandments even closer keeping than others, and could not save his life at the price of his faith. Enraged, his master stabbed him through the heart, and John died of the wound two days later, in 1773, still in his teens.
