fering saints. After she had hung thus a long while, and the wild beasts had not ventured to touch her, she was taken down and cast into prison, to be reserved for further torments; where she still continued preaching and encouraging her fellow Christians, rejoicing and triumphing in all that she had gone through, as if she had only been invited to a wedding dinner: whereupon they broiled her whole body in a frying-pan; which she not at all regarding, they took her out and wrapt her in a net, and cast her into a mad bull, who foamed and tossed her upon his horns to and fro, yet had she no feeling of pain in all these things, her mind being wholly engaged in conference with Christ. So that at length, when no more could be done unto her, she was beheaded, the Pagans themselves confessing, that never any woman was heard of among them to have suffered so many and so great torments."

As for Sanctus, deacon of Vienna, when there was nothing more that they could do to him, "they clapped red hot plates of brass upon the most tender parts of his body, which fryed, seared, and scorched him all over, yet remained he immoveable and undaunted, being cooled, refreshed, and strengthened with heavenly dews of the water of life gushing from the womb of Christ + his body being all over wound and scar, contracted and drawn together, having lost the external shape of a man. In whom Christ suffering, performed great wonders: for when those wicked men began again to torture him, supposing that if they should make use of the same tortures, while his body was swollen, and his wounds inflamed, they should master him, or that he would die, not only no such thing happened, but, beyond all men's expectation, by those latter torments his body got relief from all the disease it had contracted by what he had before suffered; he recovered the use of his limbs which he had lost; he got rid of his pains; so that, through the grace of Christ, the second torture that they put him to, proved to be a remedy and a cure to him, instead of a punishment."+

Quoted from Eusebius by Lardner, vol. 4, p. 83, and revised from the original by the author. Notwithstanding the gravity of Lardner and Addison on this subject, I mightily suspect that this Lady Blandina was nothing else than a Shrove-Tuesday pancake;-a sort of Sir John Barleycorn. She would not be the first divine sufferer who had been made of a bit of dough.-Compare with pp. 58, and 238, of this DIEGESIS.

+ The womb of Christ: so Dr. Hanmer renders it. It is not the only passage which serves to render the sex of Christ equivocal.

Lardner's translation, as far as it is followed, vol. 4, p. 87; the rest original, from Euseb. Eccl. Hist. lib. 5, c. 1.

Such is a fair specimen of ecclesiastical history, and such the trash which must be held to be credible, if the argument of martyrdom be so.

Against such evidence, which may well be considered as setting comment at defiance, we every now and then stumble on admissions of the Christian Fathers themselves that entirely exonerate the Pagan magistracy, not only from such charges as might be inferred from any supposeable ground or outline of original truth in such narrations as these, but which clear them from all suspicion of ever having countenanced persecution on the score of religion, in any case whatever. Tertullian challenges the Roman Senate to name him one of their emperors, on whose reign they themselves had not set a stigma, who had ever persecuted the Christians; and the modest and rational Melito, bishop of Sardis, in applying for redress (which was instantly granted) to Marcus Antoninus from some grievances which religious people at that time had cause to complain of, expressly states, that a similar cause of complaint had never before existed.

Even if the evidence of the reality of martyrdoms incurred for the conscientious maintenance of the Christian faith in former times, were a thousand-fold more than it is (which it could easily be), or more than is pretended (which it could not easily be) it surely could not avail against the evidence of our own absolute experience, that the merit of this argument in our times, stands altogether and exclusively on the side of infidelity. None are the persecutors but Christians themselves. None are the victims of persecution, or liable to be so, but the conscientious and honourable opponents of Christianity. It is the deniers and impugners of revelation, who alone give evidence of sincere conviction, in the voluntary abdication of station and affluence, and in the endurance of the most cruel and trying sufferings. It is our own times that have witnessed the virtue that has preferred the cell of solitary confinement, and the fate of felons and culprits with an approving conscience, to the professorial chair, the rector's mansion, or the prebendal stall, that might have been held as the wages of iniquity.

They are Christians, and of Christians the loudest and most ostentatious professors of Christianity, who alone discover the dispositions and tempers of persecutors, and are, of all persecutors, the most implacable, most cruel, most inexorable.-While those who are most conspicuous

in their professions of deprecating persecution, and who "lament that ever the arm of the law should be called in to vindicate their cause," deprecate and lament it avowedly on no other ground than that of their fear that it should render its victims objects of a pity and sympathy of which themselves are incapable.-In their own right charitable phrase, they fear lest persecution should "go near to place the martyr's crown on the loathsome hydra of infidelity;" that is, they are not sorry for the sufferer, but they are sorry that any body else should be sorry for him. They would not spare the poor victim a single pang, nor take a knot out of the lash that is laid on him, nor whisper a comfortable syllable in his ear, nor reach a cup of water to his lip, nor wipe away a tear from his cheek, nor soothe his fainting spirit with a sigh;-but they are sorry for the disturbance of the welkin-they begrudge him the pity and compassion due to his sorrows. If some way could be invented to do the business without a noise, it seems, for all their charity, it might be very well done.

One might fill libraries with works of Christian divines in protest against the principle of persecution-one act of any Christian divine whatever, in accordance with the sincerity of such a protest, would be one more than the world has ever heard of. Never did the sun see a Christian hand drawn out of the bosom to prevent persecution, to resist its violence, to say to it what doest thou? or to redress the wrong that it had done.-Of what, then are such protests evidence-but of the foulest, the grossest hypocrisy ; -hypocrisy, than which imagination can conceive no greater.-2 James, xv. 16.

The demonstrations of Euclid, therefore, are not more mathematically complete than the ratiocinative certainty that the whole argument of martyrdom, upon which the most popular treatises on the evidences of the Christian religion are founded, is as false as God is true.

CHAPTER XL.

THE APOSTOLIC FATHERS.

THE Apostolic Fathers, is the honourable distinction given to those orthodox professors of the Christian religion, who are believed to have lived and written at some time within

the first hundred years, so as to stand within a conceivable probability of having seen or conversed with some or other of the twelve apostles, and to have received their doctrine thus immediately from the fountain heads.

There are upwards of seventy claimants of this honour, exclusive of such as the pseudo Linus, and Abdias, bishop of Babylon, who pretends to have seen Christ himself, though no such person, no such bishop, and no such bishopric ever existed. The majority of these are mere imaginary names of imaginary persons, whose various actions and sufferings are altogether the creation of romance. The historians of the first three centuries of Christianity have taken so great a licence in this way, as that no one alleged fact standing on their testimony can be said to have even a probable degree of evidence. The most candid and learned even of Christian inquirers, have admitted, that antiquity is most deficient just exactly where it is most important; that there is absolutely nothing known of the church history in those times on which a rational man could place any reliance; and that the epocha when Christian truth first dawned upon the world, is appropriately designated as the Age of Fable.*

The title of Apostolic Fathers, is given only to the five individuals, St. Barnabas, St. Clement, St. Hermas, St. Ignatius, and St. Polycarp, of whom the three former have honourable mention in the New Testament; the two latter are believed to have suffered martyrdom, and each is supposed to be the author of the respective epistles which have come down to us under their names, which, notwithstanding, the church has seen reason to take for no better than they are-supernumerary forgeries. Had they, however, been retained in the canon of sacred Scripture, we should have had folios of evidence in demonstration of their authenticity; and withal the demonstration (which all religionists appeal to whenever they can) of penalties, fines, imprisonment, and infinite persecution, on all who had understanding and integrity to treat them with the contempt which every thing of the kind merits.

ST. BARNABAS—Bishop of Milan,

Was a Levite of the country of Cyprus, and one of those Christians who, having land, sold it, and brought the

Rerum gestarum fides exinde graviter laboraverit nec orbis terrarum tantum sed et Dei ecclesia de temporibus suis mysticis merito queratur.-Dr. Fell, Bishop of Oxford.

money and laid it at the apostles' feet; whereupon they changed his name from Joses into Barnabas, which signifies the son of consolation. So that he literally bought his apostleship; and having gratified the avarice of the holy conclave, their historian bears him the honourable testimony, that he was a good man, full of the Holy Ghost and of faith. (Acts xi. 24.) St. Clement of Alexandria has often quoted the epistle that goes under his name as the composition of an inspired apostle. In the catalogue of Dorotheus it is said, "Barnabas was a minister of the word together with Paul; he preached Christ first at Rome, and was afterwards made bishop of Milan :" and in the translator's preface to that catalogue, it is asserted, on I know not what authority, that Barnabas had a rope tied about his neck, and was therewith pulled to the stake and burned. We have no account of any miracles which Barnabas wrought in his lifetime, which seems rather hard dealing with him on the part of the apostolic firm, since he had paid a very handsome consideration to be admitted into full partnership. The amende honourable was made to his relics in after ages; they became wonderfully efficacious in healing all manner of diseases. His dead body had the distinguished honour of giving a certificate to the genuineness of the gospel of St. Matthew, which was found lying upon his breast, written in his own hand, when his body was dug up in the island of Cyprus, so late as the year of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, 489;* so rapidly was the Christian faith, and consequently the efficacy of the relics of the saints, extending.

"Any one who reads the Epistle of Barnabas with but a small degree of attention," says Dr. Lardner, "will perceive in it many Pauline phrases and reasonings. To give the character of the author of it, in one word, he resembles St. Paul, as his fellow labourer, without copying him."

Paley quotes only the single passage from the apocryphal epistle, which, he says, is probably genuine, ascribed to the apostle Barnabas, containing the words, "Finally teaching the people of Israel, and doing many wonders and signs among them; he (Christ) preached to them, and showed the exceeding great love which he bare towards them."+

Sigebertum Gemblacensem ad A.C. 489, itemque alios legas sub Zenonis imperio in insula Cypro repertum S. Barnabæ corpus, et super pectore ejus, Evangelium S. Matthæi idiopapov тou Вapvaßa.—Fabricii, tom. 1, p. 341. + Paley's Evid. vol. 1, p. 119.

U