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.
In some cases a recognition of one supreme deity—Jupiter—who would represent the one Almighty God of the Christians—was suggested as a “modus vivendi” by the plausible rhetoric of a statesmanlike magistrate who cared for Rome, but to whom all religions were myths.
The Christian senator, who for the sake of Christ had given up a beautiful home and an exalted rank, would be reminded by his pagan colleagues on the judges seat of the inescapable duty which one in his great position owed to law and order—to his master the Emperor;—surely he, of all men, should set an example of loyalty and obedience; was he to degrade his proud order by worshipping an unknown Crucified offender in defiance of the wishes and commands of the Emperor and the imperial government?
A yet more moving appeal was very often made to the brave Christians of both sexes by an eloquent magistrate to show some pity for those they loved,—for their aged father and mother; for husband or wife or helpless children. Were they by their fatal obstinacy to bring bereavement and disgrace, shame and poverty, on these unoffending ones?
Then behind all these specious arguments the Roman judge would show the pale confessor standing before him the awful tortures—the cruel death which surely awaited the one who refused, with what seemed a sullen and inexplicable obstinacy, to obey the laws of an immemorial Empire, when after all obedience was so easy.
And many did yield—of this there is no doubt. The number of martyrs who resisted unto death no doubt is very great, much greater than the cold and passionless critic chooses to acknowledge, but the number of those who did yield was no doubt considerable.
It was indeed a title to honour for a magistrate of Rome publicly to win over one or more of these confessors of the New Religion, to succeed in persuading some well-known Christian to scatter on the altar of the deified Emperor, or of the popular image of Mars the Avenger, or of Diana, or of the yet greater Jupiter, a few grains of incense typifying his return to the ancient pagan cult—or better still, to extract a few reluctant words in which the adored Christ was renounced and abandoned.
Such a judicial victory was ever a signal triumph for the Roman pagan judge. It would speedily bear its fruits and rally to the drooping standard of paganism a number of men and women pondering, doubting, hesitating on the threshold of Christianity; a threshold with such an example of recantation before them, which they would surely never cross!
And these scenes during the long years of active persecution were acted again and again. The war between the religion of Christ and the old idol-cult so dear to Rome and her subject millions was indeed a protracted and deadly combat, and, as far as men could see, the issue for long years trembled in the balance.
And all this time much—more than men now think—hung on the grave and solemn question of martyrdom.
It was an outward and visible sign of that new wonderful revelation which was influencing so many different minds, which was working restlessly in such varied classes, in Rome, and in the many provinces of the world of Rome, which from the early days of its appearance in the great Empire, began at once to work a mighty change in all ranks in all society where it penetrated, and every year it penetrated deeper.
The New Revelation was taught by an ever-increasing band of teachers, fervid, impassioned, eloquent—some of them learned and cultivated. It possessed too a literature which gradually increased in volume and power—a literature which was founded upon “a Record” which these teachers affirmed issued from no workshops of this earth.
But all this literature, powerful, soul-stirring though it was, only touched, comparatively speaking, a very few of the men and women who made up the mighty world of Rome. The great mass of the peoples of the Empire neither read the books nor heard the words of the teachers of the New Religion.
Something more was needed to touch the masses of the people—something thousands might see and hear of; something they might see for themselves. That something was supplied by the noble army of martyrs.
From the first days of the appearance of the new teaching the imperial government of Rome was determined, if possible, to stamp it out of the society which Rome controlled.
While the disciples of Him who gave the doctrine and the solemn charge to His own to teach the strange wonderful story to all men, were still living and bravely carrying out the command of their Master, began the relentless persecution of those who received the New Revelation (men named them Christians after their Master Christ); a persecution which was now fitful and uncertain, now fierce and relentless in its action, now languid and halting, but which never slept. During the two centuries and a half, the period roughly from Nero to Constantine,—to be a Christian was simply unlawful, and exposed its votary to the direst penalties, which at times were rigorously exacted. The law of the State at times was suffered to remain in partial abeyance; but to use the great African teacher’s nervous words spoken to the Christian Brotherhood, during all these long years—“Non licet esse vos.”108
The more statesmanlike of the Roman rulers, recognising the influence exercised by the martyrs over the people, as we have remarked, by all the means in their power encouraged apostasy—because a public renunciation of the Faith deeply moved the people. Every public act of apostasy was a heavy blow to the Christian cause; while on the other hand, each example of splendid endurance of suffering and death was a wonderful encouragement to the vast crowd of outsiders who were hesitating on the borderland of Christianity. What must be, thought these, and they were a great multitude, the secret power of the new Faith which could nerve strong men, tender women—of all ages and of different ranks—to endure such awful sufferings, and at the end to meet death with a smile lighting up the wan pain-wrung faces.