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| Chapter III.
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Chapter III.
However, as we have already remarked, it cannot but
distress us that no state shall bear unpunished the guilt of shedding
Christian blood; as you see, indeed, in what took place during the
presidency of Hilarian, for when there had been some agitation about
places of sepulture for our dead, and the cry arose, “No
areæ—no burial-grounds for the Christians,” it
came that their own areæ,449
| 449 [An obvious play on the
ambiguity of this word.] | their
threshing-floors, were a-wanting, for they gathered in no harvests. As
to the rains of the bygone year, it is abundantly plain of what they
were intended to remind men—of the deluge, no doubt, which in
ancient times overtook human unbelief and wickedness; and as to the
fires which lately hung all night over the walls of Carthage, they who
saw them know what they threatened; and what the preceding thunders
pealed, they who were hardened by them can tell. All these
things are signs of God’s impending wrath, which we must needs
publish and proclaim in every possible way; and in the meanwhile we
must pray it may be only local. Sure are they to experience it
one day in its universal and final form, who interpret otherwise these
samples of it. That sun, too, in the metropolis of Utica,450
| 450 [Notes of the time when
this was written. See Kaye, p. 57.] | with light all but extinguished, was a
portent which could not have occurred from an ordinary eclipse,
situated as the lord of day was in his height and house. You have the
astrologers, consult them about it. We can point you also to the deaths
of some provincial rulers, who in their last hours had painful memories
of their sin in persecuting the followers of Christ.451
| 451 [Christians remembered
Herod (Acts xii.
23) very naturally; but we
may reserve remarks on such instances till we come to Lactantius. But
see Kaye (p. 102) who speaks unfavourably of them.] |
Vigellius Saturninus, who first here used the sword against us, lost
his eyesight. Claudius Lucius Herminianus in Cappadocia, enraged
that his wife had become a Christian, had treated the Christians with
great cruelty: well, left alone in his palace, suffering under a
contagious malady, he boiled out in living worms, and was heard
exclaiming, “Let nobody know of it, lest the Christians rejoice,
and Christian wives take encouragement.” Afterwards he came to
see his error in having tempted so many from their stedfastness by the
tortures he inflicted, and died almost a Christian himself. In that
doom which overtook Byzantium,452
| 452 [Notes of the time when
this was written. See Kaye, p. 57.] | Cæcilius Capella
could not help crying out, “Christians, rejoice!” Yes, and
the persecutors who seem to themselves to have acted with impunity
shall not escape the day of judgment. For you we sincerely wish it may
prove to have been a warning only, that, immediately after you had
condemned Mavilus of Adrumetum to the wild beasts, you were overtaken
by those troubles, and that even now for the same reason you are called
to a blood-reckoning. But do not forget the future.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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