II
That great and severe master Tertullian, writing about a.d. 200, gives us some details of the austerities practised by those in training for a martyr's death. We will quote a very few of his burning words here. [ ""Blessed martyrs designate, think," he wrote, "how in peace soldiers (he was speaking of the training of the unconquered legions of Rome) inure themselves to war by toils, marching in heavy armour, running over the exercise yard, working at the ditches, framing the heavy 'testudo,' engaging in numberless arduous labours, so that when the day of battle comes, the body and mind may not shrink as it passes from the robe of peace to the coat of mail, from silence to clamour, from quiet to tumult. In like manner, oh blessed ones! count whatever is hard in this lot of yours which you have taken up, as a discipline of mind and body. You are about to pass through a noble struggle in which the living God is the President, the Holy Ghost is the trainer, in which the prize is an eternal crown of angelic life. . . . Therefore your Master Jesus Christ has seen good before the day of conflict . . . to impose on you a hard training that your strength may be greater" . . . "the harder the labours in the training of preparation, the stronger is the hope of victory,. . . for valour is built up by hardship."[1"]
In other places Tertullian quotes S. Paul in such passages as: "We glory in tribulations also, knowing that tribulation worketh patience, and patience experience, and experience hope" (Rom. v. 3, 4); and again: "Therefore I take pleasure" (2 Cor. xii. 10) "in infirmities, in reproaches, in necessities, in persecutions, in distresses for Christ's sake" . . . "always bearing about in our body the dying of the Lord Jesus" (2 Cor. iv. 10); and again (2 Cor. iv. 16, 17, 18), "Though our outward man perisheth yet the inward man is renewed day by day. . . . For our light affliction, which is but for a monent, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory, while we look not at the
[Footnote]1 Tertullian, Ad Martyres, 3.[Footnote]
