Page:Siam and Laos, as seen by our American missionaries (1884).pdf/406

 more Laos men had professed themselves Christians and been baptized. Then suddenly the storm that had been long gathering burst upon the infant church. On the 12th Sept., 1869, two of the newly-made converts were seized by orders from the king on some false pretext, painfully pinioned, and after a night's imprisonment, without trial, barbarously put to death, being beaten with clubs on the neck, one of them pierced also with a spear. "Faithful unto death," who can doubt they have received from the Lord Jesus, to whom dying they commended their departing spirits, the crown of life, the martyr's crown, for they were as true martyrs as any who were slain in the cruel Nero's day? The other five church-*members, taking flight, contrived to secrete themselves from those who "sought their lives to destroy them."

The situation of the missionaries themselves was now perilous in the extreme. They and their wives and their little ones were in the hands of a merciless, self-willed, reckless, bigoted despot, who hated them and their doctrines, and were five hundred miles away from consular or other aid. Succeeding at last in getting a letter to their friends at Bangkok, the brethren of the mission, startled by the tidings, and not knowing indeed if the Laos missionaries were yet in the land of the living, hastened to lay the matter before the regent. He kindly promised to despatch a