5. They who survived these tortures, and persisted in professing themselves Christians, were either executed or remanded to prison. Their prisons were only another sort of torture, being commonly dark and loathsome dungeons. Here they put fetters upon their hands and feet. Many had large pieces of wood hung at their necks: many were chained in the most uneasy postures, with weights fastened to their legs or arms. Sometimes they strewed the floor with small pieces of glass, or fragments of earthen vessels, on which they stretched out the prisoner, naked as he was, and wounded all over. There they sometimes left them to die of hunger and thirst and the festering of their wounds. At other times they carefully healed them, but it was, that they might torture them anew. They usually forbid their speaking to any person; as knowing that in this condition, they had converted many Infidels, and often the jailor, or even the soldiers that guarded them. But they permitted them to converse with any, who were like to shake their resolution; a father, a mother, a child, a wife, whose tender words, or silent eloquence, were another sort of temptation, and often more dangerous than the sharpest torments. 6. In the mean time their fellow Christians did not forget them. They prayed for them without ceasing. If they were not permitted to minister to them in prison, at least they attended them to the place of their martyrdom. They exhorted them (often to the loss of their own lives) to endure unto the end. They observed their last words, which were commonly prayers, and fortified themselves by their example. Nor was it to martyrs alone, but to confessors also, that they paid the greatest honour; that is, those who had confest Christ before the magistrate, though they had not _yet resisted unto blood_. CHAPTER VIII. _Their care of the poor and sick. Their hospitality. Their patience._ 1. THE church took care of all who were unable to help themselves, of whatever age or sex: the blind, the lame, the maimed, the decrepit; and these they esteemed the treasure of the church. They took likewise a particular care of children; not only of the orphan children of Christians, but of those whom their Heathen parents exposed, and indeed of all others they could procure. Their end in all was, by means of temporal, to lead them to spiritual good. Therefore, in like circumstances, they relieved a Christian before a Heathen, and of Christians, the most holy first. For this every church had a common stock, which the deacons distributed according to the orders of the bishop, after giving him an account of the conduct as well as wants of the people committed to his charge.