A Short History of France | Page 5

die.
Who would have dreamed that this was the germ of the most potent, the
most regenerative force the world had ever known? That thrones,
empires, principalities, and powers would melt and crumble before His
name? Of all miracles, is not this the greatest?
The passionate ardor with which this religion was propagated in the
first two centuries had no motive but the yearning to make others share
in its benefits and hopes; and to this end to accept the belief that Jesus
Christ had come in fulfilment of the promise of a Saviour--who should
be sent to this world clothed with divine authority to establish a
spiritual kingdom, in which he was King of kings, Lord of lords,
Meditator between us and the Father, of whom he was the "only
begotten Son."
The religion in its essence was absolutely simple. Its founder summed
it up in two sentences: expressing the duty of man to man, and of man
to God. That was all the theology he formulated.

For two centuries the religion of Christ was an elemental spiritual force.
It appealed only to the highest attributes and longings of the human
soul, and under its sustaining influence frail women, men, and even
children were able to endure tortures, of which we cannot read even
now without shuddering horror.
Nature's method of gardening is very beautiful. She carefully guards
the seed until it is ripe, then she bursts the imprisoning walls and gives
it to the winds to distribute. Precisely such method was used in
disseminating Christianity. It was not for one people--it was for the
healing of the nations, and its home was wherever man abides.
Nearly five decades after Christ's death upon the cross, Jerusalem was
destroyed by Titus. The home of Christianity was effaced. At just the
right moment the enclosing walls had broken, and freed to the winds
the germs in all their primitive purity.
Imperial favor had not tarnished it, human ambitions had not employed
and degraded it, nor had it been made into complex system by
ingenious casuists. The pure spiritual truth, unsullied as it came from
the hand of its founder, was scattered broadcast, as the band of
Christians dispersed throughout the Roman Empire, naturally forming
into communities here and there, which became the centres of Christian
propagandism. Lyons in Gaul was such a centre.
The fires of persecution had been lighted here and there throughout the
empire, and the Emperor Nero, under whom the Apostles Peter and
Paul are said to have suffered martyrdom, had amused himself by
making torches of the Christians at Rome. But until A.D. 177 Gaul was
exempt from such horrors.
Marcus Aurelius--that peerless pagan--large in intelligence, exalted in
character, and guided by a conscientious rectitude which has made his
name shine like a star in the lurid light of Roman history, still failed
utterly to comprehend the significance of this spiritual kingdom
established by Christ on earth. He it was who ordered the first
persecution in Gaul. In pursuance of his command, horrible tortures
were inflicted at Lyons upon those who would not abjure the new faith.

A letter, written by an eye-witness, pictures with terrible vividness the
scenes which followed. Many cases are described with harrowing detail,
and of one Blandina it is said: "From morn till eve they put her to all
manner of torture, marvelling that she still lived with her body pierced
through and through and torn piecemeal by so many tortures, of which
a single one should have sufficed to kill her; to which she only replied,
'I am a Christian.'"
The recital goes on to tell how she was then cast into a dungeon--her
feet compressed and dragged out to the utmost tension of the
muscles--then left alone in darkness until new methods of torture could
be devised.
Finally she was brought, with other Christians, into the amphitheatre,
hanging from a Cross to which she was tied, and there thrown to the
beasts. As the beasts refused to touch her she was taken back to the
dungeon to be reserved for another occasion, being brought out daily to
witness the fate and suffering of her friends and fellow-martyrs; still
answering the oft-repeated question, "I am a Christian."
The writer goes on to say, "After she had undergone fire, the talons of
beasts, and every agony which could be thought of, she was wrapped in
a network and thrown to a bull, who tossed her in the air"--and her
sufferings were ended.
Truly it cost something to say "I am a Christian" in those days.
Marcus Aurelius probably gave orders for the persecution at Lyons,
with little knowledge of what would be the nature of those persecutions,
or of the religion he was trying to exterminate. Some of the hours spent
in writing introspective