While as regards Christian records, the practice of celebrating the anniversary days of even famous martyrs and confessors only began in Rome far on in the third century.
But, as we shall see, although we possess no Christian records definitely telling us of any special persecution between the times of Nero and the later years of Domitian, the pages of the undoubtedly genuine Christian writings of very early date, from which we shall presently quote, were unmistakably all written under the shadow of a restless relentless hostility on the part of the Roman government towards the Christian sect. The followers of Jesus we see ever lived under the shadow of persecution.
Never safe for a single day was the life of one who believed in the Name; his life and the life of his dear ones were never for an instant secure: he and his family were at the mercy of every enemy, open and secret. Confiscation, degradation from rank and position, banishment, imprisonment, torture, death, were ever threatening him. A hard, stern combat, indeed, was the daily life of every Christian disciple. Many came out as victors from the terrible trial; this we learn from such writings as the Shepherd of Hermas, but some, alas! we learn from that same vivid and truthful picture of Hermas, flinched and played the traitor when the hour of decision between Christ and the pagan gods struck, as it often, very often, did in the so-called quiet days of the Flavian Emperors.
But it is only from the general character and spirit of the early Christian writers that we gather this; it is only from the allusions scattered up and down these striking and pathetic pages, which after all had other and nobler work before them than to record the many sufferings and martyrdoms of the brethren, that we learn what was the character of the hard life the followers of Jesus had to lead. So far from exaggerating, these writers give a very imperfect account of the sufferings of that period.
But in spite of this dark shadow of danger under which the Christian always lived, a cloud which for two hundred and fifty years never really lifted; in spite of popular dislike and of public condemnation,—the numbers of the persecuted sect multiplied with startling rapidity in all lands, among all the various peoples massed together under the rule of the Empire, and called by the name of Romans. Their great number attracted the attention of pagan writers such as Tacitus, writing of the martyrdoms of A.D. 64; of Pliny, speaking of what he witnessed in A.D. 112; of Christian writers like Tertullian, giving a picture of the sect at the end of the second century.
In the middle years of this second century, only a little more than a hundred years after the Resurrection morning, when the Antonines were reigning, we know that there were large congregations in Spain and Gaul, in Germany, in North Africa, in Egypt and in Syria, besides the great and powerful Church in Rome.
All that we learn of the busy, earnest, strenuous life of these early Christian communities, of their noble charities, of their active propaganda, of their grave and successful contentions with the heretical teachers who successively arose in their midst, makes it hard to believe that they were ever living, as it were, under the very shadow of persecution which might burst upon them at any moment; and yet well-nigh all the writings of these early days are coloured with these anticipations of torture, confiscation, imprisonment and death,—a death of pain and agony. The Apocalypse refers to these things again and again—Clement of Rome in his grave and measured Epistle—Hermas and Ignatius, Justin and Tertullian, and somewhat later Cyprian writing in the middle of the third century—allude to these things as part of the everyday Christian life. They give us, it is true, few details, little history of the events which were constantly happening; but as we read, we feel that the thought of martyrdom was constantly present with them.
Now what was the attraction to this Christianity, the profession of which was so fraught with danger—so surrounded with deadly peril?
“Le candidat au Christianisme, était, par le fait même, candidat au Martyre,” graphically writes the brilliant and careful French scholar Duchesne. The Christian verily exposed himself and his dear ones to measureless penalties. Now what had he to gain by such a dangerous adventure?