deserted their people, strayed among foreign provinces, hunted the markets for mercantile profits, tried to amass large sums of money, while they had brethren starving within the Church, took possession of estates by fraudulent proceedings, and multiplied their gains by accumulated usuries.”(304) Such was the end of the long peace which succeeded the persecution of Septimius Severus, and yet it was followed at once by that ten years’ conflict which if stained with apostasies at first, soon became rife in martyrdoms. And as the former relaxation seems to prove that the third century among Christians was no ideal time in which moral corruptions and abuses did not largely exist, so the improvement which trial and suffering at once produced, calling forth some of the greatest triumphs which the Faith has ever known, seems to indicate that the divine power of the Church lies not in forming a community free from imperfections, or even secured from scandals, but in building up a portion of her children to sanctity. At all times the wheat and the chaff lie together on her threshing-floor, and the flail of suffering winnows them. But those who seek for a time when all professing believers were saints, will find it neither when the Apostles taught nor afterwards. The Emperor Valerian, after being during four years more kindly disposed to Christians than any preceding emperor, and after filling his palace with them, was instigated by an Egyptian magician into becoming a most bitter persecutor.(305) This was ended in less than three years through his capture by the Persian monarch, when his son Gallienus restored the sacred places to the Christians, and ordered the bishops not to be disturbed.(306) The empire during the following eight years seemed through the supineness of Gallienus to be on the point of dissolution; it is the time when nineteen commanders in various provinces assume the purple, and successively perish. At last Gallienus is put out of the way by a council of officers, and the empire is restored by Claudius and by Aurelian. The latter, after being for some years fair to Christians, ends by persecuting them. But he too is speedily removed by death. It is remarkable that all these persecutions, by Maximin, by Decius, by Gallus, by Valerian, and by Aurelian, are of short duration: none of them continue more than three years. After Aurelian’s death in 275 a whole generation ensues in which Christians by the ordinary operation of the empire’s laws, according to which their religion was illicit, were liable to suffer much in individual cases. Thus it is in a time not reckoned persecuting, shortly after Maximianus had been made his colleague in the empire by Diocletian, that one of the most merciless acts of tyrannical cruelty took place, which gave an occasion for several thousand men at once to offer up their lives. Unresisting victims, yet brave soldiers with arms in their hands, they