memory. A certain officer at Damascus also engaged some infamous women to confess, that they had been Christians, and privy to the lascivious practices which were committed on the Lord's day in their assemblies. These and other slanders were registered, copied, and sent to the emperor, as the authenticated confession of these women, and he circulated them through his dominions. The officer who invented this calumny, destroyed himself sometime after by his own hand.* But a specious pretence was now given for augmenting the persecution. Maximin, affecting still the praise of clemency, gave orders to the prefects not to take away the lives of Christians, but to punish them with loss of eyes, and various amputations. The other abominations of this tyrant, dreadful and uncommon as they were, come not within our province. His labours against Christianity only belong to our subject. Nor did he strictly abstain from shedding blood at this season, though one would think the experience of so many years should have taught him, as well as the other tyrants, that the "blood of the martyrs was the seed of the church."

A

There appears, however, a plan of polite refinement in this renewed persecution, beyond any thing which had yet Cruelties of been practised. Maximin did not now, as he had Maximin. done formerly under Galerius, slay indiscriminately, or put to death numbers with exquisite torture. few bishops and persons of Christian renown were deprived of life, the rest were harassed by every other kind of suffering short of death, and no arts were left unemployed to root Christianity out of the mind, and educate the next generation in a confirmed aversion to it. The decrees of cities against Christians, and besides these, the copies of imperial edicts engraved in brazen tables, were nailed up and seen in every town. Nothing like this had been done before. The persecution, in this its last stage, had arrived at the perfection of diabolical ingenuity. Children in their schools daily sounded Jesus and Pilate, and other things, invented to asperse the Gospel.+

A rescript of the emperor's, nailed to a post at Tyre, manifests with what pleasure and joy he had received the petition of that city against the Christians. It venerates *[Euseb. ix. c. 6,} + [Euseb. ix. c. 7.]

Jupiter and the rest of the gods, as the authors of all good; appeals to the experience of the inhabitants how happily their affairs had proceeded since the worship of the ancients had been restored, how they were now blest with good harvests, had no plagues, earthquakes or tempests, and enjoyed peace through the empire; and how opposite to all this the case had been, while Christendom prevailed. He desires that such as persisted still in their error should be banished from Tyre, according to the prayer of the petition. This rescript was a specimen of the rest, and it cannot be denied, that either Maximin, or some persons about him, were men of capacity, industry, and activity, though surely a worse cause was never found for the exertion of these talents.

Never were Christian minds so clouded and dispirited. Thus low did God suffer his Church to fall, to try its faith, and to purify it in the furnace. Art was more poisonous than rage, and the deceptions seemed calculated to impose (if it were possible) even on the elect. Very remarkable, however, was the Divine testimony to his Church; at this time, man's extremity was the opportunity in which the truth and goodness of God appeared most conspicuous. There were doubtless many true Christians at that time wrestling with their God, to appear for his Church, and HE did so, in this manner. While the messengers were on the road with rescripts similar to that at Tyre, a drought commenced, famine unexpected oppressed the dominions of Maximin; then followed a plague with inflamed ulcers.* The sores spread over the body, but chiefly affected the eyes and blinded many. And the Armenians, the allies and neighbours of the Eastern empire, entered into a war with Maximin; they were disposed to favour the Gospel, and Maximin, by extending his persecution to them, drew on their hostility. Thus were the boasts of Maximin confounded. The plague and famine raged in the most dreadful manner, and multitudes lay unburied. The Christians, whose piety and fear of God were stirred up on this occasion, were the only persons who employed themselves in doing good, every day busying themselves in taking care of the sick, and burying * [Euseb. ix. c. 8.]

the dead, whereas numbers of Pagans were neglected by their own friends; they gathered together also multitudes of the famished poor, and distributed bread to all; thus imitating their heavenly Father, who sendeth rain on the just and the unjust. Christians still appeared to be superior to all others; and the Church was known still to exist, by fruits peculiarly her own, to the praise of her God and Saviour.

Death of

Toward the end of the year 312, died the emperor Dioclesian, who had reigned prosperously for twenty years; in the latter part of which time he commenced Dioclesian, the persecution, and abdicating the throne not A. D. 312. long after, he lived seven years a private life: happy, had he done so on motives of piety. But the mischiefs which his authority introduced continued under tyrants more ferocious than himself: and he lived not only to see these mischiefs, without power to check them, had he been so disposed, but also, what probably more afflicted his mind, to find his daughter Valeria, the widow of Galerius, and her mother, his own wife Prisca, treated with great injustice by his successors, and to solicit their release in vain.* Worn out with grief and vexation, he ended his days at length, a monument of the instability of all human greatness. He lived not to see the catastrophe of his wife and daughter, who, after a long course of sufferings, were put to death by Licinius. It is foreign to the design of this history to particularize their story, which, after all, is very mysterious. Why they should be so much persecuted, first by Maximin and then by Licinius, we know not. A conjecture may be made, but it must be considered only as a conjecture. The two princesses had doubtless favoured the Gospel in the days of their grandeur, and had defiled themselves with sacrifices to appease Dioclesian. Might they not afterwards suffer for the sake of the Gospel itself, though their persecutors might not chuse to represent them as suffering on account of Christianity? If so, the princesses sustained the cross with more fidelity than formerly. Maximin was surely capable of all this inhumanity, and that Licinius also was so, though for some time a friend of Christians, will appear hereafter.

* [Lactant. de morte persec. c. 41, 50, 51.]

A. D. 313.

In the year 313, there was a war between Licinius and Maximin, who contended each for the complete sovereignty of the East. Before the decisive battle, Maximin vowed to Jupiter, that if he obtained the victory, he would abolish the Christian name. Licinius, in a dream,* was directed to supplicate, with all his army, the supreme God, in a solemn manner. He gave directions to his soldiers to do so, and they prayed in the field of battle, using the very words which he had received in his dream. In all this the reader will see nothing suspicious, nothing but what is in its own nature very credible, when he considers that the contest between Jehovah and Jupiter was now at its height, and drawing to a crisis. Victory decided in favour of Licinius. Maximin, in consequence of this,† published a cautious decree, in which he forbad the molestation of Christians, but did not allow them the liberty of public worship. Warned by former experience of his enmity, the Christians in his dominions dared not to assemble themselves together. Whilst the rest of the Christian world, under the auspices of Constantine and Licinius, Xth Persewho published a complete toleration of Christianity, together with that of all other religions, enjoyed peace and tranquillity.

End of the

cution.

It was the will of God to lay his hand still more heavily on the tyrant. Struck with rage at his disappointments, in the sad reverse of his affairs he slew many priests Death of and prophets of his gods, by whose enchant- Maximin. ments he had been seduced with false hopes of universal empire in the East; and finding most probably that he gained no friends among Christians by his late edict, he published another in their favour as full and complete as that of Constantine and Licinius. So amazingly were affairs now changed, that contending emperors courted the favour of the poor persecuted Christians. After this he was struck with a sudden plague over his whole body, pined away with hunger, fell down from his bed, his flesh being so wasted away by a secret fire, that it consumed and dropped off from his bones; his eyes started out of their sockets; and in his distress he began to see God

Lact. de M. P. [c. 46.]

[Euseb. ix. c. 10.]

+ Euseb. b. ix. c. 9.

passing judgment on him.* Frantic in his agonies, he cried out, "It was not I, but others who did it." At length, by the increasing force of torment, he owned his guilt, and every now and then implored Christ, that he would compassionate his misery. He confessed himself vanquished,

and gave up the ghost.†

Thus closed the most memorable of all the attacks of Satan on the Christian Church. Since that time he has never been able to persecute Christians, as such, within the limits of Roman civilization in Europe. I thought the account of the most violent attempt to eradicate the Gospel, ever known, deserved to be distinctly related.

things happened more approaching to the nature of miracles, than ordinary history knows, the greatness of the contest shows at once the propriety of such signal divine interpositions, and renders them more credible. The present age affects a scepticism more daring than any preceding one : but in every age before this, all pious and considerate persons have agreed that the arm of God was lifted up in a wonderful manner, at once to chastise and to purify his Church, and also to demonstrate the truth of the Christian religion to the proudest and the fiercest of his enemies; till they were obliged to confess that the Gospel was divine, and must stand in the earth invincible; that the most High ruleth, and that he will have a Church in the world, which will glorify him, in spite of earth and hell united, and that this Church contains in it all that deserves the name of true wisdom and true virtue.

CHAP. II.

A VIEW OF THE STATE OF THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION, ON ITS ESTABLISHMENT UNDER CONSTANTINE.

THIS emperor from early life had some predilection in

* Lactantius tells us, that the immediate cause of his death was poison, which he drank in his fury. But I think Eusebius's account more probable, because Lactantius allows that he lived four days under torture. [De mort. persec. c. 49.]

+ It is remarkable, that all the associates of Maximin in his crimes, partook also of his punishments. Among these Culcian, the bloody governor of Thebais, and Theotecnus, are distinguished. His enchanters were, by torments under the authority of Licinius, compelled to lay open the frauds of their employers, and he and they, with all the children and relations of the tyrant, were destroyed. [Euseb. ix. c. 11.]