PART II
THE TRAINING FOR MARTYRDOM
Introductory
We read in the pathetic and interesting study De
Laude Martyrii (On the Praise of Martyrdom) by
an anonymous writer—a study which usually follows
the works of S. Cyprian—how some Roman officials who were
assisting in the torture of a dying Christian saint said one to
another: "This is really marvellous, this power of disregarding
pain and agony! Nothing seems to move him; he has
a wife and little ones, but even the love of these touches
him not. What is the secret of his strange power? It can
surely be no imaginary faith which enables him thus to
welcome such suffering—such a death!"
The moral effect of this endurance—of this serene acceptance of torture and death—both on persecutors and persecuted, was no doubt very great. It has probably been underrated. What we have just quoted from the treatise De Laude Martyrii, i.e. the testimony to what must have happened many thousand times—viz.: how it struck the officials who were carrying out the stern law of Rome—was repeated in our own day and time by one of our most serious historians; one not likely by any means to have been carried away by religious enthusiasm. Lecky, in his scrupulously fair but at the same time cold and passionless chapter on early Christian persecutions, closes his review of the period with the following remarkable words: "For the love of their Divine Master, for the cause they believed to be true, men, and even weak girls, endured these things (he has been detailing some of the well-known tortures and deaths of the early Christian believers)
