From the earliest period particular pains were taken by the pastors of the church to have the remains of the martyrs collected and some account of their sufferings consigned to letters; and Pope S. Clement, a disciple of the Apostle Peter, instituted a college of notaries, one for each of the seven ecclesiastical districts into which he had divided Rome, with the special charge of collecting with diligence all the information possible about the martyrs. They were not to pass over even the minutest circumstances of their confession of faith and death. This attendance on the last moments of the martyrs was often accompanied by great personal risk, or at least a heavy expense in the way of buying the good-will of venal officers; but it was a thing of the utmost importance, in view of the church’s doctrine concerning the veneration and invocation of saints, that nothing should be left undone which prudence would suggest to leave it beyond a doubt that the martyrs had confessed the _true_ faith, and had suffered death _for_ the faith. The pagans soon discovered the value that was set upon such documents, and very many of them were seized and destroyed. The fact that the Act of the martyrs were objects of careful search is so well attested--as is also the other fact, that an immense number perished--that it is a wonder and a grace of divine Providence how any, however few comparatively, have come down to us. It has been calculated that at least five million Christians--men, women, and children--were put to death for the faith during the first three centuries of the church. The French historian Ampère has very justly remarked that amidst the moral decay of the Roman Empire, when all else was lust and despotism, the Christians alone saved the dignity of human nature; and the Spaniard Balmes, when treating of the progress of individuality under the influence of Catholicity (_European Civilization_, ch. xxiii.), remarks that it was the martyrs who first gave the great example of proclaiming that “the individual should cease to acknowledge power when power exacts from him what he believes to be contrary to his conscience.” The patience of the martyrs rebuked the sensualism of the pagans; and their fearless assertions that matters of conscience are beyond the jurisdiction of any civil ruler proved them to be the best friends of human liberty; while their constancy and number during three hundred years of persecution, that only ceased with their triumph, is one of the solid arguments to prove that the Catholic Church has a divine origin, and a sustaining divinity within her. “A milk-white Hind, immortal and unchang’d, Fed on the lawns, and in the forest rang’d; Without unspotted, innocent within, She fear’d no danger, for she knew no sin: Yet had she oft been chas’d with horns and hounds, And Scythian shafts, and many wingèd wounds Aim’d at her heart; was often forc’d to fly, And doom’d to death, tho’ fated not to die.”