Martyr Blaudina. the vague charges of atheism and impiety: he was charged with being himself a Christian, and fearlessly admitted the honourable accusation. The greater part of the christian community adhered resolutely to their belief; the few whose courage failed in the hour of trial, and who purchased their security by shameful submission, nevertheless did not abandon their more courageous and suffering brethren; but, at considerable personal danger, continued to alleviate their sufferings by kindly offices. Some Heathen slaves were at length compelled, by the dread of torture, to confirm the odious charges which were so generally advanced against the Christians : -banquets on human flesh; promiscuous and incestuous concubinage; Thyestean feasts, and OEdipodean weddings. The extorted confessions of these miserable men exasperated even the more moderate of the Heathens, while the ferocious populace had now free scope for their sanguinary cruelty. The more distinguished victims were Sanctus, a deacon of Vienne; a new convert named Maturus, and Attalus, of Phrygian descent, from the city of Pergamus. They were first tortured by means too horrible to describe-if, without such description, the barbarity of the persecutors, and the heroic endurance of the Christian martyrs, could be justly represented. Many perished in the suffocating air of the noisome dungeons, many had their feet strained to dislocation in the stocks; the more detested victims, after every other means of torture were exhausted, had hot plates of iron placed upon the most sensitive parts of their bodies. Among these victims was the aged Bishop of Lyons, Pothinus, now in his ninetieth year, who died in prison after two days, from the ill usage which he had received from the populace. His feeble body had failed, but his mind remained intrepid; when the frantic rabble environed him with their insults, and demanded with contumelious cries, "Who is the God of the Christians?" he calmly replied, "Wert thou worthy, thou shouldst know." But the amphitheatre was the great public scene of popular barbarity and of Christian endurance. They were exposed to wildbeasts, which, however, do not seem to have been permitted to despatch their miserable victims, and made to sit in a heated iron chair, till their flesh reeked upwards with an offensive odour. A rescript of the Emperor, instead of allaying the popular frenzy, gave ample license to its uncontrolled violence. Those who denied the faith were to be released; those who persisted in it, condemned to death. But the most remarkable incident in this fearful and afflicting dom of scene, and the most characteristic of the social change which Christianity had begun to work, was this, that the chief honours of this memorable martyrdom were assigned to a female and a slave. Even the Christians themselves scarcely appear aware of the deep and universal influence of their own sublime doctrines. The mistress of Blandina, herself a martyr, trembled lest the weak body and, still more, the debased condition of the lowly associate in her trial, might betray her to criminal concession. Blandina shared in all the most excruciating sufferings of the most distinguished victims; she equalled them in the calm and unpretending superiority to every pain which malice, irritated and licensed, as it were, to exceed, if it were possible, its own barbarities on the person of a slave, could invent. She was selected by the peculiar vengeance of the persecutors, whose astonishment probably increased their malignity, for new and unprecedented tortures, which she bore with the same equable magnanimity. Blandina was first led forth with Sanctus, Maturus, and Attalus; and, no doubt, the ignominy of their public exposure was intended to be heightened by their association with a slave. The wearied executioners wondered that her life could endure during the horrid succession of torments which they inflicted. Blandina's only reply was, "I am a Christian, and no wickedness is practised among us." In the amphitheatre, she was suspended to a stake, while the combatants, Maturus and Sanctus, derived vigour and activity from the tranquil prayers which she uttered in her agony; and the less savage wild-beasts kept aloof from their prey. A third time she was brought forth, as a public exhibition of suffering, with a youth of fifteen, named Ponticus. During every kind of torment, her language and her example animated the courage and confirmed the endurance of the boy, who at length expired under the torture. Blandina rejoiced at the approach of death, as if she had been invited to a wedding banquet, and not thrown to the wild-beasts. She was at length released. After she had been scourged, placed in the iron chair, enclosed in a net, and, now in a state of insensibility, tossed by a bull, some more merciful barbarian transpierced her with a sword. The remains of all these martyrs, after remaining long unburied, were cast into the Rhone, in order to mock and render still more improbable their hopes of a resurrection. CHAPTER VIII. Fourth period. cession of to 284. FOURTH PERIOD. CHRISTIANITY UNDER THE SUCCESSORS OF M. AURELIUS. SUCH was the state of Christianity at the commencement of the fourth period, between its first promulgation and its establishment under Constantine. The golden days of the Roman empire had already begun to darken, and closed for ever with the reign of Marcus the philosopher. The empire of the world became the prize of Rapid suc. bold adventure, or the precarious gift of a lawless soldiery. DurEmperors, ing little more than a century, from the accession of Commodus to A. D. 180. that of Dioclesian, more than twenty Emperors (not to mention the pageants of a day, and the competitors for the throne, who retained a temporary authority over some single province) flitted like shadows along the tragic scene of the imperial palace. A long line of military adventurers, often strangers to the name, to the race, to the language of Rome, Africans and Syrians, Arabs and Thracians,-seized the quickly shifting sceptre of the world. The change of sovereign was almost always a change of dynasty, or, by some strange fatality, every attempt to re-establish an hereditary succession was thwarted by the vices or imbecility of the second generation. M. Aurelius is succeeded by the brutal Commodus; the vigorous and able Severus by the fratricide Caracalla. One of the imperial historians has made the melancholy observation, that of the great men of Rome scarcely one left a son the heir of his virtues ; they had either died without offspring, or had left such heirs, that it had been better for mankind if they had died leaving no posterity (1). Insecurity of the In the weakness and insecurity of the throne lay the strength throne fa- and safety of Christianity. During such a period, no systematic vourable policy was pursued in any of the leading internal interests of the anity. empire. It was a government of temporary expedients, of individual to Christi passions. The first and commanding object of each succeeding head of a dynasty was to secure his contested throne, and to centre upon himself the wavering or divided allegiance of the provinces. Many of the Emperors were deeply and inextricably involved in foreign wars, and had no time to devote to the social changes within the pale of the empire. The tumults or the terrors of German, or Gothic, or Persian inroad, effected a perpetual diversion from the slow and silent internal aggressions of Christianity. The frontiers constantly and imperiously demanded the presence of the Emperor, (1) Neminem prope magnorum virorum optimum et utilem filium reliquisse satis claret. Denique aut sine liberis viri interierunt, aut tales habuerunt plerique, ut meliùs fuerit de rebus humanis sine posteritate discedere. Spartiani Severus, Aug. Hist. p. 360. and left him no leisure to attend to the feeble remonstrances of the neglected priesthood: the dangers of the civil absorbed those of the religious constitution. Thus Christianity had another century of regular and progressive advancement to arm itself for the inevitable collision with the temporal authority, till, in the reign of Dioclesian, it had grown far beyond the power of the most unlimited and arbitrary despotism to arrest its invincible progress; and Constantine, whatever the motives of his conversion, no doubt adopted a wise and judicious policy, in securing the alliance, rather than continuing the strife, with an adversary which divided the wealth, the intellect, if not the property and the population, of the empire. tions during this pe riod. The persecutions which took place during this interval were the Causes of hasty consequences of the personal hostility of the Emperors, not persecuthe mature and deliberate policy of a regular and permanent government. In general, the vices and the detestable characters of the persecutors would tend to vindicate the innocence of Christianity; and to enlist the sympathies of mankind in its favour, rather than to deepen the general animosity. Christianity, which had received the respectful homage of Alexander Severus, could not lose in public estimation by being exposed to the gladiatorial fury of Maximin. Some of the Emperors were almost as much strangers to the gods as to the people and to the senate of Rome. They seemed to take a reckless delight in violating the ancient majesty of the Roman religion. Foreign superstitions, almost equally new, and scarcely less offensive to the general sentiment, received the public, the pre-eminent, homage of the Emperor. Commodus, though the Grecian Hercules was at once his model, his type, and his deity, was an ardent votary of the Isiac mysteries; and at the Syrian worship of the Sun, in all its foreign and oriental pomp, Elagabalus commanded the attendance of the trembling senate. dus, A. D. If Marcus Aurelius was, as it were, the last effort of expiring Commo Polytheism, or rather of ancient philosophy, to produce a perfect 180 to 193. man, according to the highest ideal conception of human reason, the brutal Commodus might appear to retrograde to the savage periods of society. Commodus was a gladiator on the throne; and if the mind, humanised either by the milder spirit of the times, or by the incipient influence of Christianity, had begun to turn in distaste from the horrible spectacles which flooded the arena with human carnage, the disgust would be immeasurably deepened by the appearance of the Emperor as the chief actor in these sanguinary scenes. Even Nero's theatrical exhibitions had something of the elegance of a polished age; the actor in one of the noble tragedies of ancient Greece, or even the accomplished musician, might derogate from the dignity of an Emperor, yet might, in some degree, excuse the unseemliness of his pursuits by their intellectual character. But the amusements and public occupations of Com modus had long been consigned by the general contempt and abhorrence to the meanest of mankind, to barbarians and slaves; and were as debasing to the civilised man as unbecoming in the head of the empire (1). The courage which Commodus displayed in confronting the hundred lions which were let loose in the arena, and fell by his shafts (though in fact the imperial person was carefully guarded against real dangers), and the skill with which he clave with an arrow the slender neck of the giraffe, might have commanded the admiration of a flattering court. But when he appeared as a gladiator, gloried in the acts, and condescended to receive the disgraceful pay of a profession so infamous as to degrade for ever the man of rank or character who had been forced upon the stage by the tyranny of former Emperors, the courtiers, who had been bred in the severe and dignified school of the philosopher, must have recoiled with shame, and approved, if not envied, the more rigid principles of the Christians, which kept them aloof from such degrading spectacles. Commodus was an avowed proselyte of the Egyptian religion, but his favourite god was the Grecian Hercules. He usurped the attributes and placed his own head on the statues of this deity, which was the impersonation, as it were, of brute force and corporeal strength. But a deity which might command adoration in a period of primæval barbarism, when man lives in a state of perilous warfare with the beasts of the forest, in a more intellectual age sinks to his proper level. He might be the appropriate god of a gladiator, but not of a Roman Emperor (2). Every thing which tended to desecrate the popular religion to the feelings of the more enlightened and intellectual must have strengthened the cause of Christianity: the more the weaker parts of Paganism, and those most alien to the prevailing sentiment of the times, were obtruded on the public view, the more they must have contributed to the advancement of that faith which was rapidly attaining to the full growth of a rival to the established religion. The subsequent deification of Commodus, under the reign of Severus, in wanton resentment against the senate (3), prevented his odious memory from sinking into oblivion. His insults upon the more rational part of the existing religion could no longer be forgollen, as merely emanating from his personal character. Commodus advanced into a god, after his death, brought disrepute upon the whole Polytheism of the empire. Christianity was perpetually, as it were, at hand, and ready to profit by every favourable juncture. (1) Ælii Lampridii, Commodus, in August. Hist. (2) In the new fragments of Dion Cassius re. covered by M. Mai there is an epigram pointed against the assumption of the attributes of Her cules by Commodus. The Emperor had placed his own head on the colossal statue of Hercules, with the inscription-Lucius Commodus Hercules. Aids maîc Kannivinos' 'Hganλñs, |