11 Christ came not to send peace on earth but a sword ; against the restless and resistless force of the new religion the gates of hell should not prevail. But polytheism could not be dethroned without a struggle ; nor mankind regenerated without a baptism of blood. Persecution, in fact, is the other side of aggression, the inevitable outcome of a truly missionary spirit; the two are linked together as action and reaction. To the student of ancient history all this will appear intelligible, perhaps even axiomatic. " The birth-throes of the new religion must needs be agonizing. The religion of the civilized world was passing through Medea's
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cauldron." Out of the cauldron there would come a new world, but not without fire and blood. Persecution, in short, is no mere incident in the life of the Church which might possibly have been avoided. Not so do we read either history or Christianity. Persecution rather was the necessary antagonism of certain fundamental principles and policies in the Empire of Caesar and the Kingdom of Christ.
By a sure instinct the Church discerned in the death of the martyr the repetition, not the less real because faint, of the central Sacrifice of Calvary. " As we behold the martyrs," writes Origen, "coming forth from every Church to be brought before the tribunal, we see in each the Lord Himself condemned." So Irenaeus speaks of the martyrs as " endeavouring to follow in the footsteps of Christ," and of St. Stephen, as " imitating in all things the Master of Martyrdom." In the early Church the imitation of Christ, as a formal principle in ethics, played but a secondary part, so far, at any rate, as the average member was concerned. The martyrs and confessors alone were thought of as actually following and imitat- ing Jesus ; they alone were the " true disciples " of the Master. It was enough for the servant that he should be as his Lord.^
3. It is impossible, however, to confine the application of the text to the martyrs of the first century. The Seer beheld " a great multitude, which no man could number, out of every nation, and of all tribes and people and tongues " ; and he may have viewed as one great tribulation all the distresses that afflict the Christian generations. Just as the ten thousand lamps in a huge city blend their upcast rays into the cloud of red mist which invests it at nightfall, so the sorrows of Christ's servants in all ages gather themselves into one great lurid mass before the view of the Seer. It is from the world's great storm-centre of violence and whirling wrath that the children of light emerge into victory. " The great tribulation." Common causes give rise to it. The stress and pain of the individual disciple is not peculiar to his own lot, but is part of a whole.
Some epochs may be marked by violent forms of persecution and distress, but in every age hostile tempers work against the outward happiness and well-being of Christ's followers. The hounded apostle of the first century and the uncompromising confessor of the last stand beneath the same eclipse. There is under every form of government the same prejudice against the ^ H. B. Workman, Persecution in the Early Church, 21, 51.
192 THE NOBLE ARMY OF MARTYRS
plain, pure ethic of Jesus Christ, the same tendency to pitiless rancour, the same sensibility to pain in the victims, the same subjection to death. This hostile temper works in one age by the engine of physical torture, and in another by sneer, slander, and social ostracism. The hot, bitter springs from which tears come are the same in all ages, and never run quite dry. That which the Seer here describes is a specific, undivided, palpitating pain running through the frame of Christ's mystical body, filling up in all ages that which is behind of His sufferings.
^ It is quite the usual thing in the world for saintly men to be persecuted. It has been, as it were, agreed between God and His servants on one part, and the devil and his own on the other part, that the latter should persecute the former ; that the good should suffer and be tortured, that the wicked should exercise upon them their malice, and that as long as they live in the world these should triumph, the others weep, and that after a short time all things be reversed. Let the wicked now raise up false testimonies, crushing them with affronts ; let them be cast into prisons, exiled, covered with miseries as by a mantle ; let them be loaded with all the misfortunes that can be devised, until they end this life by a sad death ; all, all will be in the end the fulfilment of the arrangement assented to very long ago between the ancient serpent and man : " She shall crush thy head, and thou shalt lie in wait for her heel." There is no need to fill pages with examples. It suffices for my purpose to say that no one can meditate on the life of any saintly man without discovering something of this, and in many of them a great deal ; indeed, this fact has come to he so widely acknowledged that we ourselves do not hold a saint to be so who does not pass through all this.^