without flinching, when one word would have freed them from their sufferings. No opinion we may form of the proceedings of priests in a later age should impair the reverence with which we bend before the martyr's tomb."[1]
Now, the more thoughtful of the pagan rulers who dreaded with a nameless dread the overthrow of the idol-cult, the preservation of which they believed was indissolubly linked with the maintenance of the great Roman Empire they loved so well, saw in the constancy of the martyrs a great danger to which this idol-cult was exposed.
Rulers so different as Nero and Domitian, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, and Marcus Antoninus, Severus, Decius, and Diocletian, and their ministers, felt that the sternest measures of repression of the new Faith were absolutely necessary if they would stem the fast advancing and apparently resistless tide of Christianity in the Empire.
In view of the powerful impression which the constancy of the accused Christian when brought face to face with all the horrors of torture and of death made upon the pagan population who beheld it or heard of it, every effort was made by the more far-seeing of the Roman magistrates to induce the accused Christian to recant and to yield to the will and wishes of the imperial government.
In countless cases this yielding was made seemingly very easy—just a few grains of incense thrown upon an idol altar; just an acknowledgment of the divinity of the reigning Emperor, which could after all be explained away as a simple official expression of fervid loyalty.
In some cases a recognition of one supreme deity—Jupiter—who would represent the one Almighty God of the Christians—was suggested as a "modus vivendi" by the plausible rhetoric of a statesmanlike magistrate who cared for Rome, but to whom all religions were myths.
The Christian senator, who for the sake of Christ had given up a beautiful home and an exalted rank, would be reminded by his pagan colleagues on the judges seat of the inescapable duty which one in his great position owed to law and order—to his master the Emperor;—surely he, of all
- ↑ Lecky, History of European Morals, chap, iii., "The Persecutions," pp. 497-8.
