A.D. 64 to 68--Persecution under Nero. 95 to 96--Persecution under Domitian. Banishment of John. 96 to 104--Time of peace. 104 to 117--Persecution under Trajan. Martyrdom of Ignatius. 117 to 161--Time of peace. Apologies of Aristides, Quadratus and Justin Martyr were written. 161 to 180--Persecution under Marcus Aurelius. Martyrdom of Polycarp and the martyrs of Lyons. 164--Justin Martyr was put to death. Statistics concerning the sufferings of the first Christians show that they were in great earnest. Eternity alone will reveal the true number of the martyrs. They all suffered and died just as we would expect, in case they knew the facts of our religion. Twenty-two books of the New Testament were written before the martyrdom of the Apostles Paul and Peter. Infidels often boast, in their ignorance, that the books of the gospels were not written by those whose names they bear. If Matthew, Mark, Luke and John did not write those books which bear their names, then are they false in fact? and if so, what did the authors die for? The sufferings of primitive Christians were great; the persecutions which they endured were outrageous, cruel and inhuman in their character. Such is the universal verdict of ancient history. Of the persecution under Nero, Tacitus, a celebrated Roman historian, who was born in the year 56, just twenty-three years after Pentecost, writes, that Nero "laid upon the Christians the charge of that terrible conflagration at Rome of which he himself was the cause." He says, "A vast multitude were apprehended. And many were disguised in the skins of wild beasts and worried to death by dogs, some were crucified, and others were wrapped in pitched shirts and set on fire when the day closed, that they might serve as lights to illuminate the night. Nero lent his own garden for these executions, and celebrated at the same time a public entertainment in the circus, being a spectator of the whole in the dress of a charioteer, sometimes mingling with the crowd on foot, and sometimes viewing the spectacle from his car." (Annals of Tacitus, 15: 44.) Juvenal, the coarse and bitter satirist of the same time, writes of the martyred Christians as "those who stand burning in their own flame and smoke, their head being held up by a stake fixed to their chin, till they make a long stream of blood and sulphur on the ground." (Juv. Sat., 1: 155.) Seneca also refers to their fearful sufferings: "Imagine here a prison, crosses and racks and the hook, and a stake thrust through the body and coming out at the mouth, and the limbs torn by chariots pulling adverse ways, and the coat besmeared and interwoven with inflammable materials, nutriment for fire, and whatever else beside _these_ cruelty has invented." (Seneca's Epistles, 14.)