with me. . . . Now am I beginning to be a disciple. . . . Come fire and cross and grapplings with wild beasts, wrenching of bones, hacking of limbs, crushings of my whole body. Come cruel tortures of the devil to assail me. Only be it mine to attain unto Jesus Christ!. . . Him I seek who died on our behalf. Him I desire who rose again for our sake. . . . Suffer me to receive the pure light: when I am come thither, then I shall be a man. Let me be an imitator of the Passion of my God. . . ."
"I write unto you in the midst of life, yet lusting after death. My desire (or my love of life) has been crucified, there is (now) no fire of earthly longing in me but only water, living and speaking in me and saying within me, 'Come to the Father.' I have no delight in the food of corruption or in the delights of life. I desire the bread of God which is the flesh of Christ, . . . and for drink I desire His blood, which is love incorruptible."
This was the new marvellous spirit in which the early Christian martyrs met and welcomed with a strange intense gladness, torture, ignominy, death. This was the spirit which the great pagan statesmen who sat at the helm of the Empire in Rome dreaded with a nameless dread, and longed to crush and to destroy, the new spirit which the wisest and most far-seeing among them felt was ever ringing the death-knell of the pagan cult, the cult they connected with the genesis, the power, and the very life of the Roman system, the cult which deified Rome and worshipped the genius of Rome's Emperor.
