In perusing the early history of the Church, there is nothing that more forcibly arrests the attention and appalls the mind than the terrible sufferings which the early Christians endured, and over which they triumphed. Let us for a moment contemplate them.
Go with me to the province of Bithynia. Its cities and villages are thronged with Christians. Every day witnesses their increase, and the temples of the Roman gods are abandoned. Pliny is the governor of that province. An edict comes from the emperor of Rome, demanding that Christianity be exterminated; that those who will not renounce it, who will not revile Christ and adore the heathen gods, be put, first to torture, and then to death. It is a command from Rome; an appalling power is raised to enforce it. It makes the blood run cold to imagine the conflict now to ensue: a conflict between the power of bodily agony and the stability of regenerated hearts. A few of the timid and half-converted shrink from the terrible ordeal, and renounce the Saviour. The rest nerve themselves to endurance; they fast and pray, and pray and fast. They call upon Christ for help; they try to encourage one another, and look forward to the hour of trial with trembling heart, for fear they should not be able to sustain the burden they are called to bear.
Go into the hall of judgment and witness the scene there. It is morning. Pliny is seated to judge and condemn. Ferocious Roman soldiers drag into the hall a Christian family. A father and mother, with their son and daughter, compose the trembling group.
The hour of trial is come.
‘Are you a Christian?’ says Pliny to the father.
‘I am!’
‘Will you revile Christ, and worship the gods?’
‘No!’
‘Apply the instrument.’
Bone after bone breaks beneath the dreadful wheel.
‘Will you renounce Christ?’
‘No!’ groans out the agonized Christian.
The glowing pincers are applied, and nerve after nerve is lacerated, till the whole frame is a mangled mass quivering with agony.
‘Will you renounce Christ?’
‘No’ feebly exclaims the exhausted sufferer.
‘Take him to his death.’
And, as the father is hurried to the yard to be beheaded, he turns his languid eyes to his fainting family, and says, ‘They that endure to the end shall be saved.’ He forgets himself and his own agony in his solicitude for his wife and children; and as the ax falls upon his neck, his lips are moving in prayer that they may be sustained.
And now the mother stands before the judge! And how will woman’s nerves endure this trial? The mother’s heart is a tempest of anguish for the trembling daughter at her side. And as the wheel crushes her limbs, and the flesh is torn from her bones, her only cry is, ‘O God of mercy, help my children!’
The soldiers, maddened with rage, drag her rudely in block, and the next moment her headless trunk was by the side of that of her husband. And now the daughter takes her stand; trembling, ting, praying, she clings to her Saviour. But as wheel performs its dreadful work, and the pincers her youthful limbs, one dreadful shriek pierces every ear, and a frantic cry of the renunciation of Christ escapes her lips.
But the cry was but the delirium of her agony. For ere the torturers have time to stop their work, she renounces her renunciation. She cries for forgiveness. She clings to her Saviour, and, in contrition for her momentary and almost unconscious denial, forgets her pain, and terrifies her executioners by the calm, the unearthly determination with which she invites them to finish their work. They do finish it terribly they finish it; and the sound of the beheading ax upon the block has not died away, before this family of martyrs are reunited in their Saviour’s arms.