OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE 135
blood, the most cruel and ignominious punishments were inflicted on the refractory Christians. 177
The Asiatic Christians had everything to dread from the severity of a bigoted monarch, who prepared his measures of violence with such deliberate policy. But a few months had scarcely elapsed before the edicts published by the two western emperors obliged Maximin to suspend the prosecution of his designs: the civil war, which he so rashly undertook against Licinius, employed all his attention; and the defeat and death of Maximin soon delivered the church from the last and most implacable of her enemies.178
In this general view of the persecution, which was first authorized by the edicts of Diocletian, I have purposely refrained from describing the particular sufferings and deaths of the Christian martyrs. It would have been an easy task, from the history of Eusebius, from the declamations of Lactantius, and from the most ancient acts, to collect a long series of horrid and disgustful pictures, and to fill many pages with racks and scourges, with iron hooks, and red-hot beds, and with all the variety of tortures which fire and steel, savage beasts and more savage executioners, could inflict on the human body. These melancholy scenes might be enlivened by a crowd of visions and miracles destined either to delay the death, to celebrate the triumph, or to discover the relics, of those canonized saints who suffered for the name of Christ. But I cannot determine what I ought to transcribe, till I am satisfied how much I ought to believe. The gravest of the ecclesiastical historians, Eusebius himself, indirectly confesses that he has related whatever might redound to the glory, and that he has suppressed all that could tend to the disgrace, of religion.170 Such an acknowledgment
See Eusebius, L. viii. c. 14, 1. ix. c. 2-8 Lactantius de M. P. c. 36. These wrats agree in representing the arts of Maximin; but the former relates the exe- on of several martyrs, while the latter expressly affirms, occidi servos Dei vetuit. (For Maximin's persecutions, cp. Görres, Brieger's Z. f. Kirchengesch. xi. 333 sqq.]
A few days before his death, he published a very ample edict of toleration, in which he imputes all the severities which the Christians suffered to the judges and governors, who had misunderstood his intentions. See the Edict. in Eusebius, 1. to [Summer, 313 A.D.]
Such is the fair deduction from two remarkable passages in Eusebius, [H. E.) L2, and de Martyr. Palestin. c. 12. The prudence of the historian has exposed his own character to censure and suspicion. It is well known that he elf had been thrown into prison; and it was suggested that he had purchased deliverance by some dishonourable compliance. The reproach was urged in time, and even in his presence, at the council of Tyre. See Tillemont, Moires Ecclésiastiques, tom. viii. part i. p. 67. [Milman admits that the oray of Eusebius is "loose" and "by no means scrupulous".]
