'Young Piso, you are bold!' 'I make no boast of courage,' I replied; 'I know that in familiar speech with Aurelian, I need not fear him. Surely you would not converse on such a subject with a slave or a flatterer. A Piso can be neither. I can speak, or I can be silent; but if I speak--' 'Say on, say on, in the name of the gods!' 'What I would say to Aurelian then is this, that slaughter as he may, the Christians cannot be exterminated; that though he decimated, first Rome and then the empire, there would still be left a seed that would spring up and bear its proper harvest. Nay, Aurelian, though you halved the empire, you could not win your game. The Christians are more than you deem them.' 'Be it so,' replied the Emperor; 'nevertheless I will try. But they are not so many as you rate them at, neither by a direct nor an indirect enumeration.' 'Let that pass, then,' I answered. 'Let them be a half, a quarter, a tenth part of what I believe them to be, it will be the same; they cannot be exterminated. Soon as the work of death is done, that of life will begin again, and the growth will be the more rank for the blood spilled around. Outside of the tenth part, Aurelian, that now openly professes this new religion, there lies another equal number of those who do not openly profess it, but do so either secretly, or else view it with favor and with the desire to accept it. Your violence, inflicted upon the open believers, reaches not them, for they are an invisible multitude; but no sooner has it fallen and done its work of ruin, than this other multitude slowly reveals itself, and stands forth heirs and professors of the persecuted faith, and ready, like those who went before them, to live for it and die for it.' 'What you say may be so,' answered Aurelian; 'I had thought not of it. Nevertheless, I will try.' 'Moreover,' I continued, 'in every time of persecution, there are those--sincere believers, but timid--who dare not meet the threatened horrors. These deny not their faith, but they shrink from sight; they for a season disappear; their hearts worship as ever, but their tongues are silent; and search as they may, your emissaries of blood cannot find them. But soon as the storm is over-past, then do they come forth again, as insects from the leaves that sheltered them from the storm, and fill again the forsaken churches.' 'Nevertheless I will try for them.'