things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen."[1]
In his treatise on "Idolatry" Tertullian enters even more into detail on this question of "training for martyrdom." He enjoined that every kind of austerity should be practised,—for instance, that hunger and thirst should be endured as an habitual observance.
This fervid exhortation closes with the singular words: "An over-fed Christian will be more necessary to bears and lions, perchance, than to God; to encounter wild beasts it will surely be his duty to train for emaciation."
All this and much more in this curious "Study" of Tertullian partake of exaggeration, but it throws considerable light on the manner on which martyrdom was positively trained for, and the body prepared for the endurance of terrible suffering, a suffering invariably closed by death. Every example of such a bravely patient endurance—every "resistance unto blood"—the Christian guides and leaders of the first 250 years felt was of inestimable value for the propagation of their cause. Every public defeat and recantation, on the other hand, would be a grave injury to their work; so the pagan government strained, as we have remarked, every nerve to make recantation easy; while the Christian masters, on the contrary, did everything which ingenuity could invent or fervid devotion suggest to train up athletes who in the supreme public trial might win the prize of martyrdom.
They were successful—in spite of many defeats. These schools of martyrdom produced in Rome and in the provinces a countless succession of brave men and women of all ranks, of all ages—who, to the amazement of the pagan world, through pain and agony again and again won the martyr's blood-stained glorious crown. It was quite a novel experience in the world, and the effect which it had worked on the rank and file of men and women was only clearly seen after the Peace of the Church. The people of Rome, from what they had seen, were persuaded with an intense persuasion, no one doubting that a Faith which could produce such
- ↑ Quoted in the Scorpiace of Tertullian, and much more from S. Paul to the same point.
