On a review of the whole period it is evident that the Church has passed from its state of concealment into almost full light. The fiery trial which it met at the beginning of the third century from the hand of Severus is the best proof that can be given how greatly it had increased, how it could no longer be ignored or despised; how its organisation which was hidden from Trajan was at least partially revealed to Severus, and how he saw and attempted to meet the danger which the earlier emperor would have tried to stamp out, had he divined it. But it is evident also that in proportion as the Christian Faith had grown, the heathen empire had been shaken in its foundations. Its period of just government was over; its imperial power was to fall henceforth into the hands of adventurers, with whom it would be more and more the symbol of force alone, and not of law: henceforth they would seldom even in blood be Roman, and more seldom still in principles. Marcus was well nigh the last zealot for the Jupiter of the Capitol: within a generation after him Heliogabalus will think of a fusion of all religions in his god the sun, and Alexander Severus of a religious syncretism wherein Orpheus, Abraham, and Christ testify together to the divine unity.(266) Nor is this a fancy of the prince alone. All the thinking minds of his time have become ashamed of Olympus and its gods. The cross has wounded them to death. A new philosophy—the last fortress into which retreating heathenism throws itself—while it breaks up Roman life, prepares the way for the Christian Faith which it strenuously combats. The Emperor Severus, fixing the eye of a statesman and a soldier on that Faith, contemplates its grasp upon society, and decrees from the height of the throne a general assault upon it; while his wife encourages a writer(267) to draw an ideal heathen portrait as a counterpart to the character of Christ, tacitly subtracting from the gospels an imitation which is to supply the place of the reality. The time was not far distant when Origen would already discern and prophesy the complete triumph of the religion thus assailed; and if Celsus had objected, that were all to do as Christians did, the emperor would be deserted, and his power fall into the hands of the most savage and lawless barbarians, would reply: “If all did as I do, men would honour the emperor as a divine command, and the barbarians drawing nigh to the word of God would become most law-loving and most civilised; their worship would be dissolved, and that of the Christians alone prevail, as one day it will alone prevail, by means of that Word gathering to itself more and more souls.”(268) But before such a goal be reached, many a martyr’s crown has yet to be won, and more than barbarian lawlessness and cruelty have to be overcome. CHAPTER XII. THE THIRD AGE OF THE MARTYR CHURCH. “Rex pacificus magnificatus est, cujus vultum desiderat universa terra.”