Immediately on his arrival the formal trial began. By a strange travesty of justice the prisoners were first cruelly tortured. Stirred by this a young nobleman, Vettius Epagathus, stood out from the crowd and demanded to be allowed to plead their cause. He was already a Christian of ascetic life and loved by his brethren as “a gracious disciple of Christ following the Lamb whithersoever He went.” “Are you a Christian?” the legate asked him. “I am a Christian,” in his boldest tones. He was immediately put amongst the accused. “Behold the Christian’s advocate,” jeered the judge. In this trial ten of the accused, weaker and worse prepared than the rest, denied Christ. This was a matter of far keener anguish to the faithful than their own sufferings. But the ranks thus broken were soon filled up by others, amongst them their aged Bishop, Pothinus. Meanwhile the slaves of Christian masters had been arrested, and tortured and bribed into swearing to all the current charges. Their evidence lashed the mob to still greater fury. No torture was now to be spared. A second time the Christians were placed at the gentle mercies of the torturers; this repetition of the torture in such cases having been legalised by Marcus. But nothing could break the spirit of these warriors; they rejoiced to be accounted worthy to suffer something for Him they loved. How intense was the nerving power of love in the souls of Sanctus the deacon and the slave-girl Blandina! Sanctus when questioned again and again did but answer: “I am a Christian.” Even when the white-hot plates of brass were applied to his body and his flesh hissed and seared beneath them, in all his agony, his one relief was to proclaim again and again: “I am a Christian.” “Bathed and refreshed,” his brethren tell us, “in the heavenly well of living water which flows from the breasts of Christ,” every fresh torture was to him “a refreshment and a remedy rather than a punishment.”