5. Unwise Zeal of the Christians.--Several examples have been preserved of a zeal impatient of those restraints which the emperors had provided for the security of the church. The Christians sometimes supplied by their voluntary declaration the want of an accuser, rudely {124} disturbed the public service of paganism, and rushing in crowds round the tribunal of the magistrates, called upon them to pronounce and to inflict the sentence of the law. The behavior of the Christians was too remarkable to escape the notice of the ancient philosophers; but they seemed to have considered it with much less admiration than astonishment. Incapable of conceiving the motives which sometimes transported the fortitude of believers beyond the bounds of prudence or reason, they treated such an eagerness to die as the strange result of obstinate despair, of stupid insensibility or of suspicious frenzy.--Gibbon. 6. Spirit of the Christian Martyrs.--The spirit of the Christian martyrs, at least of the first three centuries, may be learned from the epistle of Ignatius of Antioch, who, early in the second century was taken from Syria to Rome, where he suffered martyrdom by being thrown to the wild beasts. On his journey to Rome, under sentence of death, he wrote an epistle to the Roman saints from which the following passage is taken: "I write to the churches and I declare to all, that willingly I die for God, if it be that you hinder me not. I beg of you, do not become to me an unseasonable love. Let me be of the beasts, by whose means I am enabled to obtain God. I am God's wheat, and by the teeth of the beasts am I ground, that I may be found God's pure bread. Rather entreat kindly the beasts that they may be a grave for me and may leave nothing of my body; that not even when I am fallen asleep, I may be a burden upon any man. Then I shall be in truth a disciple of Jesus Christ, when the world seeth not even my body. Supplicate our Lord for me, that by these instruments I may be found a sacrifice to God. I am not commanding you like Peter and Paul; they were apostles, I am a condemned convict; they were free, I am hitherto a slave. But if I suffer I am a free man of Jesus Christ, and I shall rise from the dead, in him a free man. And now since I am in bonds, I learn to desire nothing. From Syria to Rome I am cast among beasts by sea and by land, by night and by day; since I am bound between ten leopards, who get worse when I do good to them. But by their ill-treatment I am furthered in my apprenticeship; still by that I am not justified. May I have to rejoice of the beasts prepared for me! and I pray that they may be found ready for me, and I will kindly entreat them quickly to devour me, and not as they have done to some, being afraid of them, to keep from touching me. And should they not be willing, I will force them."--Ignatius' Epistle to the Romans.