This spirit of martyrdom was a new principle in society. It had no classical counterpart.[185] Socrates and Seneca suffered with fortitude, but not with faith. The loftiest pagan philosophy dwindled into insignificance before the sublimity of Christian hope. This looked beyond the shadows of time and the sordid cares of earth to the grandeur of the Infinite and the Eternal. The heroic deaths of the believers exhibited a spiritual power mightier than the primal instincts of nature, the love of wife or child, or even of life itself. Like a solemn voice falling on the dull ear of mankind, these holy examples urged the inquiry, “What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?” And that voice awakened an echo in full many a heart. The martyrs made more converts by their deaths than in their lives. “Kill us, rack us, condemn us, grind us to powder,” exclaims the intrepid Christian Apologist; “our numbers increase in proportion as you mow us down.”[186] The earth was drunk with the blood of the saints, but still they multiplied and grew, gloriously illustrating the perennial truth--_Sanguis martyrum semen ecclesiæ._[187] Christianity, after long repression, became at length triumphant. The 116 church on the conversion of Constantine emerged from the concealment of the Catacombs to the sunshine of imperial favour. The legend of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus strikingly illustrates the wondrous transformation of society. These Christian brothers, taking shelter in a cave during the Decian persecution, awoke, according to the legend, after a slumber of over a century, to find Christianity everywhere dominant, and a Christian emperor on the throne of the Cæsars.[188] The doctrines of Christ, like the rays of the sun, quickly irradiated the world.[189] With choirs and hymns, in cities and villages, in the highways and markets, the praises of the Almighty were sung.[190] The enemies of God were as though they had not been.[191] The Lord brought 117 up the vine of Christianity from a far land, and cast out the heathen, and planted and watered it, till it twined round the sceptre of the Cæsars, wreathed the columns of the Capitol, and filled the whole land. The heathen fanes were deserted, the gods discrowned, and the pagan flamen no longer offered sacrifice to the Capitoline Jove. Rome, which had dragged so many conquered divinities in triumph at its chariot wheels, at length yielded to a mightier than all the gods of Olympus. The old faiths faded from the firmament of human thought as the stars of midnight at the dawn of day. The banished deities forsook their ancient seats. They walked no longer in the vale of Tempe or in the grove of Daphne.[192] The naiads bathed not in Scamander’s stream nor Simois, nor the nereids in the waters of the bright Ægean Sea. The nymphs and dryads ceased to haunt the sylvan solitudes. The oreads walked no more in light on Ida’s lofty top.