03 Chapter 3.The Fifth and Sixth General Persecutions of the Roman Pagan Empire.
Chapter 3. The Fifth and Sixth General Persecutions of the Roman Pagan Empire.
A.D. 200-238. The extraordinary fortitude which we have seen in Polycarp, Ignatius, and others was not peculiar to those men. The power of endurance was not merely displayed in the Christian of long experience, or the man of natural strength and courage; it was seen in the timid and delicate; in women as well as men; in the child of tender years, as well as in the man of hardy age. The strength by which they conquered was not their own, but God’s; by whose power, and whose alone, they were kept through faith. (1 Peter i. 5.) There were some, it is true, who sought to face the enemy in their own strength, and such was Quintus a Phrygian, who went about persuading others to invite persecution, but who, in the first moment of actual danger, drew back and denied his Master. Of the reality of his zeal we need not doubt, but he acted without faith. He trusted in his own strength, instead of looking to another; and remembered not that God had said, "My strength is made perfect in weakness." He dropped the shield of faith, whereby he might have quenched the fiery darts of the wicked, and adopted the shield of self-confidence, which, as might be expected, was pierced by the first arrow of the enemy. Not so Perpetua, the martyr of Carthage, who suffered during the persecution of which we are to speak, and whose name will ever find a foremost place in the annals of martyrology.
It was in the beginning of the third century, and the Emperor Severus occupied the throne of the Caesars. An African by birth, he was a man of great sagacity and learning, but was loathed for his perfidy and cruelty. The persecution which commenced in his reign was unsurpassed for barbarity by any that had gone before, and certainly was not exceeded by any that came after. At one time he appears to have been not unfavourably disposed to the Christians; and it is even said that he ascribed his recovery from a severe illness to the prayers of a Christian named Proculus. But his moderation did not last, and in the year 202 the persecution broke out in Africa with unwonted violence. Neither the eloquent appeals of Tertullian to the humanity of the people, nor the solemn warnings which he addressed to the prefect of Africa, availed to stem the flood of popular fury which now rolled in upon the Christians. One after another they were haled to torture and execution, till the words of the great apologist were verily fulfilled, "Your cruelty will be our glory. Thousands of both sexes, and of every rank will crowd to martyrdom, exhaust your fires, and weary your swords. Carthage will be decimated; the principal persons in the city, even perhaps your own most intimate friends and kindred, must be sacrificed. Vainly will you war against God!" The noble army of martyrs did indeed get many reinforcements from the far-famed capital of Roman Africa; and Vivia Perpetua, a catechumen or new convert to the faith, was one of these.
She was a married woman, of good family and education, and though only twenty-two years of age, the mother of one child, then an infant at the breast. Her father was a Pagan, and loved her dearly; and when she was apprehended and thrown into prison, he sought by every means to win her back to Paganism. On one occasion when he had been unusually earnest in his endeavours, she pointed to a pitcher that stood near them, and said, "My father, you see that vessel; can you call it by any other name than what it is?" He told her "No," "Neither can I," said Perpetua, "call myself by any other name than that of Christian." At this her father turned upon her angrily and beat her, and departed; and for several days she saw him no more.
During his absence she was baptised, together with four other youthful converts, one of them her brother; and with that the hand of persecution began to press more heavily upon her, for she was cast with her companions into the common dungeon. Here all light was excluded, and she was almost suffocated by reason of the heat and overcrowding. "O miserable day!" she writes, "from the dreadful heat of the prisoners crowded together, and the insults of the soldiers. But I was wrung with solicitude for my infant. Two of our deacons, however, by the payment of money obtained our removal for some hours in the day to a more open part of the prison. Each of the captives then pursued his usual occupation; but I sat and suckled my infant, who was wasting away on my account. And for many days I suffered this anxiety, and accustomed my child to remain in the prison with me; and I immediately recovered my strength, and was relieved from my toil and trouble for my infant; and the prison became to me like a palace; and I was happier there than I should have been anywhere else."
After a few days there was a rumour that the prisoners were to be heard, and her father, wasted with anxiety, came from the city with increased desire to save her. His manner of approaching her was changed, and threats and violence gave place to supplication and entreaty. He begged her to take pity on his grey hairs, and to think of the honour of his name; to remember all his former kindness, and how he had loved her the best of all his children. He urged her to look in pity upon her mother and brothers, and upon her dear babe who could not live without her. "Do not destroy us all!" he cried. And then he flung himself at her feet, weeping bitterly, and kissed her hands in his fondness, and clinging like a suppliant to her dress, said he would no longer call her daughter, but "mistress," because she was the mistress of all their fates. But Perpetua, mightily sustained by God, endured the agony of the moment with unshaken fortitude, only saying, "In this trial, what God wills, will take place. Know that we are not in our own power, but in that of God." In due time the hour of her trial came round, and she was placed at the bar with the other prisoners. When it came to her turn to be examined, the poor old man, her father, appeared with the child, and holding it before her eyes, again implored her to have compassion. Alive to the occasion, Hilarianus, the procurator, ceased his stern interrogations, and said in his softest manner, "Spare the grey hairs of your parent; spare your infant; offer sacrifice for the welfare of the emperor." But she answered, "I will not sacrifice." He then demanded, "Art thou a Christian?" and she answered, "I am a Christian." Upon this her father broke into loud and frantic cries, insomuch that the procurator ordered him to be thrust down, and beaten with rods: all which she endured with calmness and fortitude. Sentence of death was then passed upon her, and she was taken back to prison with the rest.
Once again, when the day of the games approached, the old man visited her, and with wilder entreaties begged her to pity him in his affliction, and to consent to sacrifice; but though her grief was very great she faltered not in her steadfastness, and would not deny the faith. These, indeed, were the hardest trials she had to encounter, but they were over at last, and her end was very near. On the day of execution she was brought forth with her own brother, and a female martyr, by name Felicitas, and the two women were tied in nets and thrown to an enraged cow. But the injuries which Perpetua sustained were not fatal, and the people, glutted though not satiated with the sight of blood, called upon the executioner to administer the death-stroke. Rousing as from a pleasant dream, Perpetua drew her torn robe more closely about her person, and gathered up her fallen hair; and when she had addressed a few faint words of encouragement to her brother, she guided the gladiator’s sword to a vital part, and so expired. Brave Perpetua! the heart beats quick as we read thy wondrous history: but we shall yet, through God’s grace, see thee crowned and happy in thy Master’s presence. In the same year (A.D. 202) died Irenaeus, bishop of Lyons, a sincere lover of souls, and a zealous defender of the truth. He withstood the then bishop of Rome,* a man of great arrogance and little piety, in whom the foul spirit of the Papacy was, alas! but too manifest, and wrote him a synodical epistle in the name of the Gallic churches. The following extract from another letter which Irenaeus addressed to one Florinus, a schismatic of Rome, will doubtless be read with interest. "I saw thee," he says, "when I was yet a boy in the lower Asia with Polycarp, moving in great splendour at court, and endeavouring by all means to gain his esteem. I remember the events of those times much better than those of more recent occurrence. As the studies of our youth, growing with our minds, unite with them so firmly that I can tell also the very place where the blessed Polycarp was accustomed to sit and discourse; and also his entrances, his walks, his manner of life, the form of his body, his conversations with the people, and his familiar intercourse with John, as he was accustomed to tell, as also his familiarity with those that had seen the Lord. How also he used to relate their discourses, and what things he had heard from them concerning the Lord. Also concerning his miracles, his doctrine, all these were told by Polycarp, in consistency with the holy scriptures, as he had received them from the eyewitnesses of the doctrine of salvation."
{*By name Victor. Yet this man afterwards died a martyr’s death rather than purchase his liberty by a denial of the faith.}
Irenaeus had many conflicts with the false teachers of his time, who, alas! were increasing but too rapidly; and his zeal presently drew upon him the resentment of the emperor. He was led out to the summit of a hill in company with some other Christians, and on refusing the usual test, to sacrifice to idols, was beheaded. So also, at Alexandria, died Leonidas, a man of rank and learning, and the father of Origen of whom we shall have more to say hereafter. Likewise two Christians by name Serenus, with Heraclides, Heron and Plutarch, the latter a pupil of Origen. We might swell the list with many more, but space forbids; and there is a blessed satisfaction in the thought, that a day is coming when we shall not only know their names, but see them crowned, and doubtless hold sweet communion together. The sixth general persecution commenced with the accession of Maximin, a Thracian, A.D. 235, and lasted three years. The immediate cause of the persecution was peculiar. Maximin entertained a savage hatred towards his predecessor, Alexander, and in order to shew his malice, reversed as much as possible the policy of Alexander’s reign. That humane and excellent ruler had dealt kindly with the Christians, and hence the burly Thracian could do no other than treat them with corresponding severity. His first edict commanded that only the chief men of the churches should be slain, but the cruelty of his nature was stimulated by this sanguinary act, and the edict was quickly followed by another of a more sweeping character. During his reign the Christians were haled away to execution without trial, and often were buried in heaps like dogs. The magistrates could offer them no protection from the savagery of the mob, or the tyranny of individual oppressors; and thus their property became the general booty, and their lives the sport of every passing whim of the populace. But men and women were still found everywhere, who were faithful to the cause; and the more the emperor sent abroad his edicts, the brighter shone the lights which he was vainly endeavouring to put out.
Two hundred years had now rolled away since the death of Christ; two hundred years of odium and suffering for His beloved church, but still its numbers were increasing. Again and again the powers of hell had been loosed against it, but all to no effect. "This was an anvil which had worn out many a hammer," and when the Thracian savage ascended the imperial throne he found that he had the same difficulties to overcome, the same mysterious power to subdue, which had baffled the wiliest and most indefatigable of his predecessors. In truth, the church throve in persecution, and the seeds of the gospel, scattered over an ever widening area, and watered by the blood of martyrs, bore fruit a hundredfold, though the efforts to tread them down were terrible and relentless. The power of man in all its varied forms had been arrayed against the unresisting community, but neither imperial edicts, nor angry mobs, nor discontented augurs, nor gibing philosophers could check its steady growth, much less accomplish its destruction. Fixed on its Rock foundation it stood there — the work of God and the wonder of men; with that eternal promise its strong confidence, "The gates of hell shall not prevail against it."