that great fountain of influence, Rome, where he had founded a church containing a "vast multitude," according to the expression of Tacitus, A.D. 65, and where, according to his own presentiment, he was martyred the same year. The confessors who followed the apostles, like them won the approving testimony of conscience, and the profound esteem of all good men. Their blood was considered the seed of the church, which said concerning them: "To each victor is promised now the tree of life and exemption from the second death, now the hidden manna with the white stone, and an unknown name: now to be clothed in white, not to be blotted out of the book of life, and to be made a pillar in the temple of God, inscribed with the name of his God and Lord of the heavenly Jerusalem: and now to sit down with the Lord on his throne, once refused to the sons of Zebedee." About the beginning of the third century arose a discussion which throws light upon the spirit manifested by the martyr-victims of those days. Celsus, on the part of the heathen, reproached his opponents with the fortitude of Anaxarchus, who, when pounded in a mortar, exclaimed, "Pound the shell of Anaxarchus, himself you touch not." "What," he asks, "did your Deity say in his sufferings comparable to this?" Origen returned the appropriate answer, that a pious submission to God's will, or even a prayer, such as "if it be possible, let this cup pass from me," is more truly magnanimous than the affectation of insensibility, so lauded by stoical paganism. The martyr's surrender of his body to the executioner was esteemed an act of faith, a baptism unto Christ, and came to be regarded as a sacrament of certain efficacy, seeing that no subsequent fall could annul its power. "Be thou faithful unto death," was evermore whispered in the ear of the confessor, "and I will give thee a crown of life." Thus pacific and defenceless, the primitive church conquered the proud array of pagan and imperial power; and the doubting world, forced to admit a divine interposition in behalf of this new religion, beheld a testimony from heaven to its truth. Perhaps the strongest confidence in the resurrection, and the most energetic subscription to the declaration, "If our earthly house of this tabernacle be dissolved, we have a building of God," was expressed by Ignatius, who, knowing the danger often incurred in obtaining the remains of the martyrs, expressed a wish to be so entirely devoured by beasts, that no fragment of his body should be found.