“Without ceasing for our Emperors we offer prayer ... we ask for whatever, as man or Cæsar, an Emperor could wish.... With our hands thus stretched out and up to God, rend us with your iron claws, hang us up on crosses, wrap us in flames, take our heads from us with the sword, let loose the wild beasts on us; the very attitude of a Christian praying is one of preparation for its punishment. Let this, good rulers, be your work, wring from us the soul beseeching God on the Emperor’s behalf. Upon the truth of God, and devotion to His Name, put the brand of crime” (Tertullian, _Apol._ 30). “Christians alone are forbidden to say anything in their defence to help the judge to a righteous decision; all that is cared about is getting what the public hatred demands--the confession of the Name” (Tertullian, _Apol._ 2). Constantly Tertullian refers to the great offence in the Christians simply lying in “the Name.” “Your sentences, however, are only to this effect, viz.: that one has confessed himself to be a Christian,” occurs frequently (Tertullian, _Ad Nationes_, 8). PART II THE TRAINING FOR MARTYRDOM INTRODUCTORY We read in the pathetic and interesting study _De Laude Martyrii_ (On the Praise of Martyrdom) by an anonymous writer--a study which usually follows the works of S. Cyprian--how some Roman officials who were assisting in the torture of a dying Christian saint said one to another: “This is really marvellous, this power of disregarding pain and agony! Nothing seems to move him; he has a wife and little ones, but even the love of these touches him not. What _is_ the secret of his strange power? It can surely be no imaginary faith which enables him thus to welcome such suffering--such a death!” The moral effect of this endurance--of this serene acceptance of torture and death--both on persecutors and persecuted, was no doubt very great. It has probably been underrated. What we have just quoted from the treatise _De Laude Martyrii_, _i.e._ the testimony to what must have happened many thousand times--viz.: how it struck the officials who were carrying out the stern law of Rome--was repeated in our own day and time by one of our most serious historians; one not likely by any means to have been carried away by religious enthusiasm. Lecky, in his scrupulously fair but at the same time cold and passionless chapter on early Christian persecutions, closes his review of the period with the following remarkable words: “For the love of their Divine Master, for the cause they believed to be true, men, and even weak girls, endured these things (he has been detailing some of the well-known tortures and deaths of the early Christian believers) without flinching, when one word would have freed them from their sufferings. No opinion we may form of the proceedings of priests in a later age should impair the reverence with which we bend before the martyr’s tomb.”[107]