AN ANONYMOUS STORY entitled, The Martyr of the Catacombs: A Tale of Ancient Rome, was published many years ago. A copy of that book was salvaged from an American sailing vessel, commanded by Captain Richard Roberts, abandoned at sea, after a disastrous hurricane in January, 1876. It is now in the possession of his son.
This volume, bearing the same title, is a carefully edited reprint of that book, and it is now jointly sent forth in the hope that it may be used of the Lord to bring vividly before faithful and thoughtful, as well as careless and thoughtless, believers and their children, in these last and evil days, a picture of what the early saints endured for our Lord Jesus Christ, under one of the bitter persecutions of heathen Rome; and which, we believe, will surely be repeated with satanic intensity in the future, under the Roman Empire.
May it remind us all that we may, if our Lord tarry a while longer in the heavens, be called upon to suffer for His sake.
The Bible no longer has a lawful place in most of our schools and colleges; family prayer is generally a lost habit; our Lord Jesus Christ, God's only begotten and well beloved Son, is discredited and dishonored in the house of His professed friends; the call to Laodicea to repent is unheeded; and our Lord's promise of communion with Him is now to the individual.
The promise to Smyrna: "Be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown of life," may reach even unto us of these days.
The blood of the martyrs in Russia and Germany cries from the ground, a warning to Christians of every country.
But we may still send up the longing cry, "Come, Lord Jesus, come quickly"