Take Marcus Aurelius: Mr. Lecky, the eloquent and able writer on "European Morals," has held him up as an example of what pure philosophy can do, and has challenged comparison between him and the most exalted and sanctified of the followers of Christ. We may well acknowledge the nobleness, the disinterestedness, the simplicity, and the elevation of his character. No absolute and irresponsible governor of men has ever been more "clear in his high office." Yet the concessions, which his panegyrist has made concerning him, separate him off by a broad line of demarcation from the highest types of Christian holiness. When his wife died, for his children's sake he would not contract a second marriage; but he preferred the society of a mistress. When he persecuted the Christians, an act which we may perhaps attribute to mistaken conscientiousness, he not only persecuted them, but he derided their sufferings. Could we in these days even call a man Christian who could so err? Professed Christians, no doubt, fall into licentiousness, but then they know they are in act repudiating their Christianity. Christians, alas! have persecuted those whom they regarded as heretics. But we must look fairly at the sad history of persecution before we simply say that Roman emperors did no more. In the first place, persecution was not inconsistent with the principles of heathenism, nor is it inconsistent with the principles, if such there be, of atheism or of atheistic philosophy; but it is wholly inconsistent with the principles taught by Christ, and can only have been tolerated when those principles had been perverted or obscured. In the next place, Christian persecutors, believing that their own form of Christianity was the only faith that could save mankind, esteeming therefore those who defiled that faith as more dangerous to mankind than any robbers or murderers, thought consistently, though erroneously, that they were bound to stamp out heresy as they would stamp out pestilence in their cattle sheds, or moral pestilence in their homes and villages. In the third place, though deeds of violence always harden the hearts of those that do them, it is well known that even inquisitors, so far from ridiculing the sufferings of their victims, often decreed those sufferings with trembling hands and broken accents, and eyes filled with tears. Persecutors are no types of Christian excellence; the truest Christianity utterly repudiates them; but even persecutors have generally been so, not from love of persecution, but from a deep and painful conviction that persecution was a duty and a necessity.