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| Chapter L.
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Chapter L.
In that case, you say, why do you complain of our
persecutions? You ought rather to be grateful to us for giving you the
sufferings you want. Well, it is quite true that it is our desire to
suffer, but it is in the way that the soldier longs for war. No one
indeed suffers willingly, since suffering necessarily implies fear and
danger. Yet the man who objected to the conflict, both fights
with all his strength, and when victorious, he rejoices in the battle,
because he reaps from it glory and spoil. It is our battle to be
summoned to your tribunals that there, under fear of execution, we may
battle for the truth. But the day is won when the object of the
struggle is gained. This victory of ours gives us the glory of
pleasing God, and the spoil of life eternal. But we are overcome. Yes,
when we have obtained our wishes. Therefore we conquer in
dying;151
| 151 [Vicimus cum
occidimur.] | we go forth victorious at the very time we
are subdued. Call us, if you like, Sarmenticii and
Semaxii, because, bound to a half-axle stake,
we are burned in a
circle-heap of fagots. This is the attitude in which we conquer, it is
our victory-robe, it is for us a sort of triumphal car. Naturally
enough, therefore, we do not please the vanquished; on account of this,
indeed, we are counted a desperate, reckless race. But the very
desperation and recklessness you object to in us, among yourselves lift
high the standard of virtue in the cause of glory and of fame. Mucius
of his own will left his right hand on the altar: what sublimity of
mind! Empedocles gave his whole body at Catana to the fires of
Ætna: what mental resolution! A certain foundress of Carthage gave
herself away in second marriage to the funeral pile: what a noble
witness of her chastity! Regulus, not wishing that his one life should
count for the lives of many enemies, endured these crosses over all his
frame: how brave a man—even in captivity a conqueror! Anaxarchus,
when he was being beaten to death by a barley-pounder, cried out,
“Beat on, beat on at the case of Anaxarchus; no stroke falls on
Anaxarchus himself.” O magnanimity of the philosopher, who even
in such an end had jokes upon his lips! I omit all reference to those
who with their own sword, or with any other milder form of death, have
bargained for glory. Nay, see how even torture contests are
crowned by you. The Athenian courtezan, having wearied out the
executioner, at last bit off her tongue and spat it in the face of the
raging tyrant, that she might at the same time spit away her power of
speech, nor be longer able to confess her fellow-conspirators, if even
overcome, that might be her inclination. Zeno the Eleatic, when he was
asked by Dionysius what good philosophy did, on answering that it gave
contempt of death, was all unquailing, given over to the tyrant’s
scourge, and sealed his opinion even to the death. We all know how the
Spartan lash, applied with the utmost cruelty under the very eyes of
friends encouraging, confers on those who bear it honor proportionate
to the blood which the young men shed. O glory legitimate, because it
is human, for whose sake it is counted neither reckless foolhardiness,
nor desperate obstinacy, to despise death itself and all sorts of
savage treatment; for whose sake you may for your native place, for the
empire, for friendship, endure all you are forbidden to do for
God! And you cast statues in honour of persons such as these, and
you put inscriptions upon images, and cut out epitaphs on tombs, that
their names may never perish. In so far you can by your monuments, you
yourselves afford a sort of resurrection to the dead. Yet he who
expects the true resurrection from God, is insane, if for God he
suffers! But go zealously on, good presidents, you will stand
higher with the people if you sacrifice the Christians at their wish,
kill us, torture us, condemn us, grind us to dust; your injustice is
the proof that we are innocent. Therefore God suffers that we thus
suffer; for but very lately, in condemning a Christian woman to the
leno rather than to the leo you made confession that a
taint on our purity is considered among us something more terrible than
any punishment and any death.152
Nor does your
cruelty, however exquisite, avail you; it is rather a temptation to
us. The oftener we are mown down by you, the more in number we
grow; the blood of Christians is seed.153
Many
of your writers exhort to the courageous bearing of pain and death, as
Cicero in the Tusculans, as Seneca in his Chances, as
Diogenes, Pyrrhus, Callinicus; and yet their words do not find so many
disciples as Christians do, teachers not by words, but by their deeds.
That very obstinacy you rail against is the preceptress. For who that
contemplates it, is not excited to inquire what is at the bottom of it?
who, after inquiry, does not embrace our doctrines? and when he has
embraced them, desires not to suffer that he may become partaker of the
fulness of God’s grace, that he may obtain from God complete
forgiveness, by giving in exchange his blood? For that secures the
remission of all offences. On this account it is that we return thanks
on the very spot for your sentences. As the divine and human are ever
opposed to each other, when we are condemned by you, we are acquitted
by the Highest.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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