HE was priest of Scété, and hermit in that vast desert. He excelled in an unparalleled gift of meekness, continency, prayer, and recollection. Once perceiving in himself some motions of anger to rise, he that instant threw down certain baskets he was carrying to market, and ran away to avoid the occasion.[1] When, in his old age, others persuaded him to abate something in his labor, he answered: "If we consider what the Son of God hath done for us, we can never allow ourselves any indulgence in sloth. Were my body burnt, and my ashes scattered in the air, it would be nothing."[2] Whenever the enemy tempted him to despair, he said, "Were I to be damned, thou wouldest yet be below me in hell; nor would I cease to labor in the service of God, though assured that this was to be my lot." If he was tempted to vain-glory, he reproached and confounded himself with the thought, how far even in his exterior exercises he fell short of the servants of God, Antony, Pambo, and others.[3] Being asked the reason of his abundant tears, he answered: "I weep for my sins: if we had only once offended God, we could never sufficiently bewail this misfortune." He died a little before the year 391. His name stands in the Roman Martyrology, on the fifteenth of January. See Cassian. coll. 18, c. 15 and 16. Tillem. t. 8, p. 440.
1. Cotellier, Mon. Gr. t. 1, p. 487. 2. Ib. p. 686. Rosweide, l. 5, c. 7 3. Cotel. ib. t. 2, p. 48. Rosweide, l. 3, c. 101, l. 7, c. 11.
(COMMONLY, IN AUVERGNE, BONET; AT PARIS, BONT.)
ST. BONET was referendary or chancellor, to Sigebert III., the holy king of Austrasia; and by his zeal, religion, and justice, flourished in that kingdom under four kings. After the death of Dagobert II., Thierry III. made him governor of Marseilles and all Provence, in 680. His elder brother St. Avitus II., bishop of Clermont, in Auvergne, having recommended him for his successor, died in 689, and Bonet was consecrated. But after having governed that see ten years, with the most exemplary piety, he had a scruple whether his election had been perfectly canonical; and having consulted St. Tilo, or Theau, then leading an eremitical life at Solignac, resigned his dignity, led for four years a most penitential life in the abbey of Manlieu, now of the order of St. Bennet, and after having made a pilgrimage to Rome, died of the gout at Lyons on the fifteenth of January in 710, being eighty-six years old. His relics were enshrined in the cathedral at Clermont; but some small portions are kept at Paris, in the churches of St. Germain l'Auxerrois, and St. Bont, near that of St. Merry. See his life, { 158} written by a monk of Sommon in Auvergne, in the same century, published by Bollandus, also le Cointe, an. 699. Gallia Christiana Nova, &c.