which stands on the flowery banks of the rapid Guadiana. Let him tell us of anything, even in the fancied facts of strangest romance, that is half as marvellous as the history of St. Cyr, the child-confessor and martyr of three years old, who, when he was taken up into the governor’s embrace to be coaxed into apostasy, lisped out his brave confession, “Christianus sum,” and was dashed to pieces on the steps of the tribunal. Will the profane historian speak of wonderful endurance? We invite him to look at the child Barallah, in his seventh year, who was suspended in the air and scourged before his mother’s eyes, and who, as his blood sprang out on all sides, and his little bones were stripped of their flesh, could be brave and unflinching whilst the rough executioners themselves shed tears of pity. As the blood flowed from his body, the little martyr cried out in the burning heat of his torments, “I am thirsty; give me a little water.” His brave mother reproved him, saying, “Soon, my son, thou wilt be at the source of living waters”; and she carried her child in her arms to the spot where he was to be beheaded, and as his head was severed from his body she received it into her veil. Tell us, profane historian, of great mothers like this. Tell us if your greatest heroes could be so invincible in the midst of suffering as the child-martyrs of the Catholic Church. The three ages of martyrdom in the church’s history are emphatically the ages of great heroes. No brave man that ever went to death for any other cause went so boldly or was so calm and dignified as the Christian martyr in the presence of the executioner. Never before in the annals of the human race were men known to go to death rejoicing; never before were they seen to smile and be glad when brought in sight of the rack and the gibbet. This perfection of courage and sublime self-possession were seen every day among the martyrs of the church. This it was that amazed the frantic rabble which witnessed their sufferings; it was this that oftentimes enraged the Roman governors so far as to drive them to order the death-blow to be inflicted before the torturers had done their appointed work. The joy with which the martyrs gave their blood for Christ’s holy name is one of the problems which unchristian philosophers have never been able to solve. These so-called thinkers have never been able to comprehend the long, mysterious blood-shedding of those three hundred years. The Christian philosopher alone, with his great Catholic principles of history, can understand that _blood-shedding_ is the mysterious law which characterizes in such a striking manner the great work of the Incarnation. As he gazes into the past, he sees the sacrificial blood flowing in every nation’s worship. Far back in the ages of the patriarchs, he can discern the red stream glistening; and as his eye still gazes, he sees it flowing ever onward, with typical significance, through the centuries, until it meets the God-man’s