Europe over the merely Christian saints: in France, Jeanne d'Arc; in Russia, Serge of Radonez; in Germany, Luther; among the Serbs, St Savva, and St Peter of Cettinje. Another enemy of the Church from the beginning was Imperialism. First of all Roman Imperialism. Christ's second "crime," for which He was brought before Pilate, was His disregard of Caesar. And Caesar was the symbol of the Roman world-dominion. Therefore, one Caesar after the other did their best to exterminate this dangerous Christian sect. Therefore, among hundreds of religions only Christianity practically was prohibited in the Roman Empire, as a religio illicita. No wonder! All other religions which swarmed in Rome were tolerated as naive curiosities by the people who had lost their own religion. But Christianity was marked as an enemy from the first. Not only a corrupted Caesar, like Nero, persecuted the Church, but the wise ones like Trajan and Diocletian, and the wisest, like Marcus Aurelius. There were plenty of pretexts to excite the public mind: burnings, earthquakes, diseases, etc. It was Trajan who prohibited by an edict the Christian secret clubs, Hetoerias, as dangerous to the State. And it was the philosopher Marcus Aurelius who sentenced to death the Christian philosopher, Justin, on Imperialistic grounds. Rome was armed to the teeth and the Church had no arms at all except an ardent belief and the inspired word. Rome drew the sword against the unarmed Christians, and the Christians armed only with Jesus Christ, and with empty hands, took the challenge. The enemies knew each other from the beginning. Rome's conviction was: better to lose the soul than the Empire; and the Christians' was: better to save the soul than to get an Empire. The Roman persecutors were every day sure of their victory, slaughtering defenceless men and women, or throwing them ad bestias, whereas the martyrs saw their victory as a distant vision, and still rejoiced. "The prison was like a palace to me," exclaimed St Perpetua. And Saturus, another martyr, spoke to his executors: "Mark our faces well, that you may know us again in the day of judgment." Such was the spirit of the primitive Church in her duel with pagan Imperialism. Islam was another kind of Imperialism against which the Church fought. If the Roman Imperialism was cool, calculating, without any fanaticism, Islam was a unique form of religious, fanatical Imperialism, having in view world-conquest and world-dominion, like Rome and yet unlike Rome. Here the Church fought with the sword against the sword. Before the definite fall of the Roman Empire the crusades of Christianity against Islam began, and it has not been finished until this day. Very dramatic was this struggle in Palestine, under Western crusaders, in Spain and Russia. But I think the most dramatic act of this dramatic conflict happened in the Balkans, especially in Serbia, during the last five hundred years.