Now, the more thoughtful of the pagan rulers who dreaded with a nameless dread the overthrow of the idol-cult, the preservation of which they believed was indissolubly linked with the maintenance of the great Roman Empire they loved so well, saw in the constancy of the martyrs a great danger to which this idol-cult was exposed. Rulers so different as Nero and Domitian, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, and Marcus Antoninus, Severus, Decius, and Diocletian, and their ministers, felt that the sternest measures of repression of the new Faith were absolutely necessary if they would stem the fast advancing and apparently resistless tide of Christianity in the Empire. In view of the powerful impression which the constancy of the accused Christian when brought face to face with all the horrors of torture and of death made upon the pagan population who beheld it or heard of it, every effort was made by the more far-seeing of the Roman magistrates to induce the accused Christian to recant and to yield to the will and wishes of the imperial government. In countless cases this yielding was made seemingly very easy--just a few grains of incense thrown upon an idol altar; just an acknowledgment of the divinity of the reigning Emperor, which could after all be explained away as a simple official expression of fervid loyalty. In some cases a recognition of one supreme deity--Jupiter--who would represent the one Almighty God of the Christians--was suggested as a “modus vivendi” by the plausible rhetoric of a statesmanlike magistrate who cared for Rome, but to whom all religions were myths. The Christian senator, who for the sake of Christ had given up a beautiful home and an exalted rank, would be reminded by his pagan colleagues on the judges seat of the inescapable duty which one in his great position owed to law and order--to his master the Emperor;--surely he, of all men, should set an example of loyalty and obedience; was he to degrade his proud order by worshipping an unknown Crucified offender in defiance of the wishes and commands of the Emperor and the imperial government? A yet more moving appeal was very often made to the brave Christians of both sexes by an eloquent magistrate to show some pity for those they loved,--for their aged father and mother; for husband or wife or helpless children. Were they by their fatal obstinacy to bring bereavement and disgrace, shame and poverty, on these unoffending ones? Then behind all these specious arguments the Roman judge would show the pale confessor standing before him the awful tortures--the cruel death which surely awaited the one who refused, with what seemed a sullen and inexplicable obstinacy, to obey the laws of an immemorial Empire, when after all obedience was so easy.