PART II
THE TRAINING FOR MARTYRDOM
Introductory
We read in the pathetic and interesting study De Laude Martyrii (On the Praise of Martyrdom) by an anonymous writer—a study which usually follows the works of S. Cyprian—how some Roman officials who were assisting in the torture of a dying Christian saint said one to another: “This is really marvellous, this power of disregarding pain and agony! Nothing seems to move him; he has a wife and little ones, but even the love of these touches him not. What is the secret of his strange power? It can surely be no imaginary faith which enables him thus to welcome such suffering—such a death!”
The moral effect of this endurance—of this serene acceptance of torture and death—both on persecutors and persecuted, was no doubt very great. It has probably been underrated. What we have just quoted from the treatise De Laude Martyrii, i.e. the testimony to what must have happened many thousand times—viz.: how it struck the officials who were carrying out the stern law of Rome—was repeated in our own day and time by one of our most serious historians; one not likely by any means to have been carried away by religious enthusiasm. Lecky, in his scrupulously fair but at the same time cold and passionless chapter on early Christian persecutions, closes his review of the period with the following remarkable words: “For the love of their Divine Master, for the cause they believed to be true, men, and even weak girls, endured these things (he has been detailing some of the well-known tortures and deaths of the early Christian believers) 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.”[107]
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.