might not, for the cause of man, be made to suffer whatever nature would most shrink from suffering in the cause of God. “The times we live in are proofs,” he cried, “of this. How many and how great are the instances we have seen, in which no height of birth, no degree of rank, no personal dignity, no time of life, have saved men from coming to the most unexpected end, for some man’s cause, either at his own hands, if they stood against him, or if for him, by the hands of his adversaries.”(206) It was a time at which the extremes of reckless cruelty, of profuse luxury, of shameless dissoluteness, met together; in which women were forbidden by an express law to expose themselves on the arena as gladiators; in which, when the emperor Severus would legislate against adultery, a memorial was handed to him with the names of three thousand persons whom his law would touch.(207) Such was the character of the time which followed at once on the empire’s golden age; the time in which the Church of God was lengthening her cords and strengthening her stakes, and building up her divine polity amid the worthlessness of the world’s greatest empire, and the instability of all earthly things. II. In the last review which we took of her material progress we said that to the eye of Pius Antoninus she would not yet appear from her multitude as a power in the state. But before the end of the seventy-four years which we are here considering as one period, it was otherwise. Already in the reign of Commodus, Eusebius states that the word of salvation was bringing to the worship of the one God men out of every race, so that in Rome itself many distinguished for wealth and rank embraced it with their whole families.(208) A few years later, when Tertullian writes his apology, he makes the heathen complain “that the state is overrun with us, that Christians are found in the country, in forts, in islands; that every sex and age and condition and rank come over to them.”(209) And again; “we are of yesterday, and have already filled every place you have, your cities, islands, forts, boroughs, councils, your very camps, tribes, corporations, the palace, senate, and forum. Your temples only we leave you. For what war should we not be equal, we who are so ready to be slaughtered, if our religion did not command us rather to suffer death than to inflict it.” Elsewhere he speaks of Christians as “so great a multitude of men as to be almost the majority in every city.” Now make whatsoever allowance we will for Tertullian’s vehemence, such statements, laid before adversaries, if they had not a great amount of truth in them, would bring ridicule on his cause rather than strengthen it. Tertullian besides wrote at the time of the general persecution set on foot by Septimius Severus against the Christian Faith, which itself was a proof of what importance it had assumed. We may perhaps put the first twenty years of the third century as the point at which, having passed through the