biographer; concerning which it has been well remarked that little as this seems to say, it had been said of no one of his predecessors, though several had not persecuted the Church.(199) And therefore this expression must mean that he left them in an entire liberty as to religion. It is indeed the exact contradiction of what, thirty years before, Tertullian had stated respecting the law in the time of Septimius Severus; for one of his complaints in pleading for Christians was, “your harsh sentence ‘that we are not allowed to exist,’ is an open appeal to brute force.”(200) Alexander Severus, the darling of his people, perished by the hands of some treacherous soldiers suborned by his successor Maximin; and with him ends this period of seventy-four years, which we will consider together, in order to estimate the progress of the Christian Faith. A time of more remarkable contrasts in rulers cannot be found. It begins with Marcus Aurelius, and it ends with Alexander Severus, the two most virtuous of heathen princes; between them it contains Commodus, Caracalla, and Heliogabalus, the three generally reputed the most vicious; while the definitive course which the history of the empire took is given to it by another, Septimius Severus, of great abilities and mixed character, who gained the empire as a successful soldier, and was true to his origin in that he established the ultimate victory of pure force over every restriction of a civil constitution: an African unsparing of blood, who sat on the throne of Augustus, and worked out the problem of government which the founder of the empire had started by preparing the result of Diocletian. The rule of Commodus and his successors fully revealed the fatal truth, that the five princes who from the accession of Nerva had governed as if they were really responsible to the senate, had only been a fortunate chance; that this time of prosperity rested upon no legal limitation of rights between those things wont to exist only in severance,(201) the sovereign’s power and the subject’s freedom; that it was no result of a constitution which had grown up under a mutual sense of benefit arising from authority exercised conscientiously, and obedience cordially rendered. The age which Tacitus(202) at its commencement had called “most blessed” was indeed over, and as soon as the second Antonine left the scene, a state of things ensued in which tyranny and cruelty were as unchecked as under Nero or Domitian at their worst. It became evident that all had depended on the sovereign’s personal character. From Marcus to Commodus the leap was instantaneous; and so, again, afterwards the short-lived serenity and order of Alexander’s rule passed at his death into a confusion lasting for more than forty years, which threatened to break up the very existence of the empire.