These three scenes of martyrdom at Rome, at Smyrna, and at Lyons, will give a notion of the grounds upon which Eusebius asserts that in the reign of Marcus Aurelius innumerable martyrs suffered(262) throughout the world through popular persecutions. Respecting the following reign of Commodus he says, on the contrary, that the Church enjoyed peace, for while the law which considered Christianity an illicit religion had not been revoked, it was made capital to inform against any one as Christian; and yet if the information took place, and the crime was proved, the punishment of death ensued, as in the case of the senator Apollonius recorded by him.(263) This state of things would seem to have lasted about seventeen years, until the year 197, when Severus, some time after his accession, became unfavourable to Christians. And it brings us to Tertullian, whose writings are full of testimonies to the sufferings endured by Christians for their Faith. For some time these sufferings would seem to fall under the same sort of intermittent popular persecution, which we have seen prevailing in the time of Marcus: but in the year 202 Severus published an edict forbidding any to become Jews or Christians. And forthwith a persecution broke out so severe and terrible, that many thought the time of Antichrist was come. It was no longer the mere action of an original law against all unauthorised religions, but an assault led on by the emperor himself, who turned directly the imperial power against Christianity as a whole. It raged especially at Alexandria, where the master of the catechetical school writes: “we have before our eyes every day abundant instances of martyrs, tortured by fire, impaled, beheaded: they are superior to pleasure; they conquer suffering; they overcome the world.”(264) Then it was that Origen, a youth of seventeen, desired to share the martyrdom of his father Leonides, and that seven whom he had himself instructed, gained this crown. Then it was that the slave Potamiæna, in the bloom of youth and beauty, not only rejected every blandishment of corruption, but suffered the extremest torture of fire to preserve her innocence and faith, and gained at Alexandria such a name as St. Lawrence afterwards gained at Rome. So at Carthage Perpetua and Felicitas, young mothers, with their companions repeated the example of those whom we have seen suffering at Lyons; in which city a second persecution as vehement as the first breaking out numbered Irenæus with his predecessor Pothinus, his people in this case as in the other accompanying the pastor’s sacrifice with their own.