Diocletian issued a decree that every church should be burned, that every copy of the Scriptures should be consigned to the flames, and that every Christian, of whatever rank, sex, or age, should be tortured, and thus compelled to renounce Christianity. No pen can describe the horrors of this persecution, the dismay with which it crushed all Christian hearts, or the fortitude with which the disciples of Jesus bore the scourgings, fire, and death. We might fill pages with narratives of individual cases of suffering and of heroism. How little do we in this nineteenth century appreciate the blessing of being permitted to worship God according to the dictates of our consciences, with none to molest or make afraid! While Diocletian was thus persecuting the Christians, he was also struggling with almost superhuman energy to hold together the crumbling elements of the Roman empire, assailed at every point by the barbarians. Nations die slowly: their groans are deep, their convulsions awful. For several centuries, Rome was writhing in death’s agonies. In the twenty-first year of his reign, and the fifty-ninth of his age, Diocletian, enfeebled by sickness, and exhausted by the cares of empire, resolved to abdicate his throne. At the same time, he compelled Maximian to abdicate at Milan. It was his design to re-organize the Roman empire into two kingdoms, instead of four. This was the origin of the division of the Roman world into the Eastern and Western empires. The morning sun rose upon the Oriental realms of Galerius: its evening rays fell upon the Occidental kingdom of Constantius. The ceremony of abdicating the empire of the world by Diocletian was very imposing. About three miles from the city of Nicomedia there is a spacious plain, which was selected for the pageant. Upon a lofty throne, Diocletian, pale and emaciate, announced to the immense multitude assembled his resignation of the diadem. Then, laying aside his imperial robes, he entered a closed chariot, and repaired to a rural retreat which he had selected at Salona, on the Grecian shore of the Adriatic Sea. It was the 1st of May, A.D. 305. Accustomed for many years to luxury, he surrounded himself in a magnificent castle with the highest appliances of wealth and grandeur. With the eye of an artist he had selected the spot. From the portico there was a view of wondrous beauty. The wide panorama spread out before him an enchanting landscape of the cloud-capped mountains of Greece, with towering Olympus, the blue waters of the Mediterranean, and the green, luxuriant, and Eden-like islands of the Adriatic.