Under Antoninus Pius the Christians were very cruelly treated in some of the provinces of Asia, which occasioned Justin Martyr to write his first Apology. It doth not, however, appear to have been done, either by the order or consent of this emperor. On the contrary, he wrote letters to the cities of Asia, and particularly to those of Larissa, Thessalonica, Athens, and all the Greeks, that they should create no new troubles to them. It is probable, that the Asiatic cities persecuted them by virtue of some former imperial edicts, which do not appear ever to have been recalled; and, perhaps, with the connivance of Antoninus Philosophus, the colleague and successor of Pius in the empire. Under him began, as it is generally accounted, the fourth persecution, upon which Justin Martyr wrote his second Apology, Meliton his, and Athenagoras his Legation or Embassy for the Christians. Meliton, as Eusebius relates it,[47] complains of it as “an almost unheard of thing, that pious men were now persecuted, and greatly distressed by new decrees throughout Asia; that most impudent informers, who were greedy of other persons’ substance, took occasion from the imperial edicts, to plunder others who were entirely innocent.“ After this he humbly beseeches the emperor, that he would not suffer the Christians to be any longer used in so cruel and unrighteous a manner. [E]Justin Martyr,[48] in the account he gives of the martyrdom of Ptolemæus, assures us, that the only question asked him was, “whether he was a Christian?” And upon his confession that he was, he was immediately ordered to the slaughter. Lucius was also put to death for making the same confession, and asking Urbicus the prefect, why he condemned Ptolemy, who was neither convicted of adultery, rape, murder, theft, robbery, nor of any other crime, but only for owning himself to be a Christian. From these accounts it is abundantly evident, that it was still the very name of a Christian that was made capital; and that these cruelties were committed by an emperor who was a great master of reason and philosophy; not as punishments upon offenders against the laws and public peace, but purely for the sake of religion and conscience; committed, to maintain and propagate idolatry, which is contrary to all the principles of reason and philosophy, and upon persons of great integrity and virtue in heart and life, for their adherence to the worship of one God, which is the foundation of all true religion, and one of the plainest and most important articles of it. The tortures which the persecutors of the Christians applied, and the cruelties they exercised on them, enough, one would think, to have overcome the firmest human resolution and patience, could never extort from them a confession of that guilt their enemies would gladly have fixed on them. And yet innocent as they were in all respects, they were treated with the utmost indignity, and destroyed by such inventions of