Page:Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1827) Vol 2.djvu/192

 174 THE DECLINE AND FALL CHAP, was not so much the past offence, as the actual rc- ' sistance, which excited the indignation of the magi- strate. He was persuaded that lie offered them an easy pardon, since if they consented to cast a few grains of incense upon the altar, they were dismissed from the tribunal in safety and with applause. It was esteemed the duty of a humane judge to endeavour to reclaim, rather than to punisli, those deluded entliu- siasts. Varying his tone according to the age, the sex, or the situation of the prisoners, he frequently conde- scended to set befoi'e their eyes every circumstance which could render life more pleasing, or death more terrible ; and to solicit, nay to entreat them, that they would show some compassion to themselves, to their families, and to their friends ^ If threats and persua- sions proved ineffectual, he had often recourse to vio- lence : the scourge and the rack were called in to sup- ply the deficiency of argument ; and every art of cruelty was employed to subdue such inflexible, and, as it ap- peared to the pagans, such criminal, obstinacy. The ancient apologists of Christianity have censured, with equal truth and severity, the irregular conduct of their persecutors, who, contrary to every principle of judi- cial proceeding, admitted the use of torture, in order to obtain, not a confession, but a denial, of the crime which was the object of their enquiry ^ The monks of succeeding ages, who in their peaceful solitudes en- tertained themselves with diversifying the deaths and sufferings of the primitive martyrs, have frequently in- vented torments of a much more refined and ingenious nature. In particular, it has pleased them to suppose, that the zeal of the Roman magistrates, disdaining every consideration of moral virtue or public decency, endeavoured to seduce those whom they were unable to vanquish, and that by their orders the most brutal ■■ See the rescript of Trajan, and the conduct of Pliny. The most au- thentic acts of the martyrs abound in these exhortations. Divin. V. 9. Their reasonings are almost the same ; but we may discover that one of these apologists had been a lawyer, and the other a rhetorician.
 * In particular, see Tcrtullian, Apol. c. 2, 3, and Lactantius, Institut.