persons who had embraced the enthusiasm of the Christians.”*

What extraordinary motive, what new and never before heard of spring of human action can have been brought into play, to set men all at once persecuting the very best of religions, who had never persecuted any other that ever was in the world; and to induce those unquestionably wise and good men, whose justice and generosity had never been impeached till then, just then to lay aside their justice and generosity, to be wise and good men no longer, but to be converted into persecutors, and to become enemies to the death of the meek and innocent followers of an offenceless faith? Surely here is problem without solution, effect without cause, and improbability without evidence. To believe that the first preachers of Christianity, or their immediate successors, were the victims of persecution, we must shut out the evidence of all other histories but such as they themselves put into our hands, and determine to believe not only without evidence, but in direct contradiction to it. Nor even will such a degree of obstinacy make sure work for our persuasion that the Christians generally testified their sincerity by martyrdom, since,

4th. It is positively denied by the very authorities on whose testimony alone it could be pretended." In the time of Tertullian and Clemens of Alexandria, the glory of martyrdom, with the universal consent of the Christian community, was confined to the singularly distinguished personages St. Peter, St. Paul, and St. James."+

St. James is said to have been murdered by St. Paul, and therefore his death ought not to be laid to the charge of Pagan persecution.

The martyrdom of St. Peter and St. Paul is contrary to the indications of the New Testament itself, and rests on no better credit than that of the Apostolic history of Abdias, which the church has rejected as apocryphal.

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Dionysius, the friend of Origen, reckons in the immense city of Alexandria, and under the rigorous persecution of Decius, only ten men, and seven women, who suffered for the profession of the Christian name ;" and Origen himself declares, in the most express terms, that the number of martyrs was very inconsiderable.

* Gibbon, vol. 2, p. 422.

† Ibid, vol. 2, p. 427.

Specimens of Martyrology.

The Roman legends tell of ten thousand Christian soldiers who were crucified in one day by order of the Emperor Trajan, or Adrian, on Mount Ararat ; on the strength of no better authority than which, our church of England daily repeats the palpable and egregious falsehood, The noble army of martyrs praise thee !" The fact itself is of such a nature, even in the judgment of sincere Christians, as to be pronounced not only not true, but utterly, physically and morally, impossible to be true.

And of this character, and no better, are all the stories of martyrdom endured by Polycarp, Ignatius, and others, under the humane and just Trajan, and the martyrdoms of Sanctus, Maturus, Pothinus, Ponticus, Attalus, Blandina, and all the martyrs of Vienna and Lyons, who, if we will believe Eusebius, Addison, and, I blush to say, Lardner, suffered under the administration of Antoninus Verus, were fryed to death in red hot iron chairs, and suffered such torments, as to be sure it was physically impossible that they should have suffered.

"The holy martyrs," says the veracious historian, "underwent such torments as are above all description. However he makes an attempt to describe them, and tells us, that "the tormenters who were employed to torment (the young lady) Blandina, tortured her all manner of ways from morning till evening, relieving each other by turns," till they themselves became feeble and faint with exertion, and acknowledged themselves overcome, there being nothing more that they could do to her; and they wondered that she had any breath left, her whole body having been tortured and mangled; and they declared, that any one torture used by them was sufficient to deprive her of life, much more so many and so great. But that blessed woman renewed her strength, and it was a refreshment and ease to her; and though her whole body was torne to pieces, yet by pronouncing the words, 'I am a Christian, neither have we committed any evil,' she was immediately recreated and refreshed, and felt no pain. So after the executioners had given up the business of attempting to kill her, which they were by no means able to accomplish, she was hung up in chains, dangling within the reach of wild beasts. And this, no doubt, was so done by the ordinance of God, that she, hanging in the form of a cross, might, by her incessant prayers, procure cheerfulness of mind to the suf

fering saints. After she had hung thus a long while, and the wild beasts had not ventured to touch her, she was taken down and cast into prison, to be reserved for further torments; where she still continued preaching and encouraging her fellow Christians, rejoicing and triumphing in all that she had gone through, as if she had only been invited to a wedding dinner: whereupon they broiled her whole body in a frying-pan; which she not at all regarding, they took her out and wrapt her in a net, and cast her into a mad bull, who foamed and tossed her upon his horns to and fro, yet had she no feeling of pain in all these things, her mind being wholly engaged in conference with Christ. So that at length, when no more could be done unto her, she was beheaded, the Pagans themselves confessing, that never any woman was heard of among them to have suffered so many and so great torments."*

As for Sanctus, deacon of Vienna, when there was nothing more that they could do to him, "they clapped red hot plates of brass upon the most tender parts of his body, which fryed, seared, and scorched him all over, yet remained he immoveable and undaunted, being cooled, refreshed, and strengthened with heavenly dews of the water of life gushing from the womb of Christ ;† his body being all over wound and scar, contracted and drawn together, having lost the external shape of a man. In whom Christ suffering, performed great wonders: for when those wicked men began again to torture him, supposing that if they should make use of the same tortures, while his body was swollen, and his wounds inflamed, they should master him, or that he would die, not only no such thing happened, but, beyond all men's expectation, by those latter torments his body got relief from all the disease it had contracted by what he had before suffered; he recovered the use of his limbs which he had lost; he got rid of his pains; so that, through the grace of Christ, the second torture that they put him to, proved to be a remedy and a cure to him, instead of a punishment."

Quoted from Eusebius by Lardner, vol. 4, p. 83, and revised from the original by the author. Notwithstanding the gravity of Lardner and Addison on this subject, I mightily suspect that this Lady Blandina was nothing else than a ShroveTuesday pancake;-a sort of Sir John Barleycorn. She would not be the first divine sufferer who had been made of a bit of dough.-Compare with pp. 58, and 238, of this DIEGESIS.

The womb of Christ: so Dr. Hanmer renders it. It is not the only passage which serves to render the sex of Christ equivocal.

Lardner's translation, as far as it is followed, vol. 4, p. 87; the rest original, from Euseb. Eccl. Hist. lib. 5, c. 1.

Such is a fair specimen of ecclesiastical history, and such the trash which must be held to be credible, if the argument of martyrdom be so.

Against such evidence, which may well be considered as setting comment at defiance, we every now and then stumble on admissions of the Christian Fathers themselves that entirely exhonerate the Pagan magistracy, not only from such charges as might be inferred from any supposeable ground or outline of original truth in such narrations as these, but which clear them from all suspicion of ever having countenanced persecution on the score of religion, in any case whatever. Tertullian challenges the Roman Senate to name him one of their emperors, on whose reign they themselves had not set a stigma, who had ever persecuted the Christians; and the modest and rational Melito, bishop of Sardis, in applying for redress (which was instantly granted) to Marcus Antoninus from some grievances which religious people at that time had cause to complain of, expressly states, that a similar cause of complaint had never before existed.

Even if the evidence of the reality of martyrdoms incurred for the conscientious maintenance of the Christian faith in former times, were a thousand-fold more than it is (which it could easily be), or more than is pretended (which it could not easily be) it surely could not avail against the evidence of our own absolute experience, that the merit of this argument in our times, stands altogether and exclusively on the side of infidelity. None are the persecutors but Christians themselves. None are the victims of persecution, or liable to be so, but the conscientious and honourable opponents of Christianity. It is the deniers and impugners of revelation, who alone give evidence of sincere conviction, in the voluntary abdication of station and affluence, and in the endurance of the most cruel and trying sufferings. It is our own times that have witnessed the virtue that has preferred the cell of solitary confinement, and the fate of felons and culprits with an approving conscience, to the professorial chair, the rector's mansion, or the prebendal stall, that might have been held as the wages of iniquity.

They are Christians, and of Christians the loudest and most ostentatious professors of Christianity, who alone discover the dispositions and tempers of persecutors, and are, of all persecutors, the most implacable, most cruel, most inexorable. While those who are most conspicuous

in their professions of deprecating persecution, and who "lament that ever the arm of the law should be called in to vindicate their cause," deprecate and lament it avowedly on no other ground than that of their fear that it should render its victims objects of a pity and sympathy of which themselves are incapable.-In their own right charitable phrase, they fear lest persecution should "go near to place the martyr's crown on the loathsome hydra of infidelity;" that is, they are not sorry for the sufferer, but they are sorry that any body else should be sorry for him. They would not spare the poor victim a single pang, nor take a knot out of the lash that is laid on him, nor whisper a comfortable syllable in his ear, nor reach a cup of water to his lip, nor wipe away a tear from his cheek, nor soothe his fainting spirit with a sigh ;-but they are sorry for the disturbance of the welkin-they begrudge him the pity and compassion due to his sorrows. If some way could be invented to do the business without a noise, it seems, for all their charity, it might be very well done.

One might fill libraries with works of Christian divines in protest against the principle of persecution-one act of any Christian divine whatever, in accordance with the sincerity of such a protest, would be one more than the world has ever heard of. Never did the sun see a Christian hand drawn out of the bosom to prevent persecution, to resist its violence, to say to it what doest thou? or to redress the wrong that it had done. Of what, then are such protests evidence-but of the foulest, the grossest hypocrisy ; -hypocrisy, than which imagination can conceive no greater. James, ii. 15, 16.

The demonstrations of Euclid, therefore, are not more mathematically complete than the ratiocinative certainty that the whole argument of martyrdom, upon which the most popular treatises on the evidences of the Christian religion are founded, is as false as God is true.

CHAPTER XL.

THE APOSTOLIC FATHERS.

THE Apostolic Fathers, is the honourable distinction given to those orthodox professors of the Christian religion, who are believed to have lived and written at some time within