Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Sermons Prayers volume 2.djvu/150

134 and a rich wife to the young man who joined their church? It was not exactly so; nay, it was considerably different. They could offer their converts hunger, and nakedness, and peril, and prison, and the sword; ay, and the scorn of relatives and the contemporaneous jeer of a cruel world. But "the word of God grew and prevailed." The nice voluptuary, the dainty woman, too delicate to set foot upon the ground, became converted, and then they could defy the axe of the headsman and the tormentor's rack. Unabashed they stood before wild beasts; ay, they looked in the face of the marshals and commissioners and district judges of those times,—men who perverted law and spit on justice with blasphemous expectoration,—and yet the religious soul did not fear!

In the Catholic Church this is Saint Victorian's Day. Here is the short of his story. He was an African nobleman of Adrumetum, governor of Carthage with the Roman title of Proconsul, the wealthiest man in the province of Africa. He was a Catholic; but Huneric, the king of the Vandals in Africa, was an Arian, and in the year four hundred and eighty began to persecute the Catholics. He commanded Victorian to continue the persecution, offering him great wealth and the highest honours. It was his legal obligation to obey the king. "Tell the king that I trust in Christ," said the Catholic proconsul; "the king may condemn me to the flames, to wild beasts, to any tortures, I shall never renounce the Church." He was put to the most tormenting tortures, and bore them like a man. Others met a similar death with the same steadiness of soul. Even the executioners felt the effect of such heroism of endurance. "Nobody," said they, "embraces our religion now; everybody follows the example of the martyrs."

The Catholic Church tried the same weapons against heretics that had been first found wanting when turned against the early Christians. The tyrant, with the instinct of Pharaoh, seeks to destroy the male children, the masculine intellect, conscience, affections, soul. Then a new race of Pauls and Justins springs up; a new Ignatius, Polycarp, and Victorian start into life. The Church may burn Arnaldo da Brescia, Savonarola, Huss;—what profits it? The religion which the tyrant persecutes makes the victim stronger than the victor ; then it steals into the heart of