Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 6.djvu/112

Rh brought before him. In the "examination" they were treated with such cruelty that Yettius Epagathus, a Christian of distinguished family, imdertook their defence, a man so exactly virtuous, that, though young, he won the honour of old Zacharias—"walking in all the commandments and ordinances of the Lord blameless." The commissioner asked him, "Art thou also a Christian?" Epagathus made his "admission" in a loud voice, and shared the fate of the martyrs. The Christians called him the Comforter of Christians,—"for he had the Comforter, the Spirit, in him, more than Zacharias himself;" a title as hateful then as Friend of the Slave now is in the Court or the Church of Kidnappers in Boston.

Sanctus, the Deacon; Maturus, a new convert; Attains, from Asia Minor, one of the pillars of the Church; Blandina, a female Slave ; Pothinus, ninety years old, and Bishop of Lyons, hard by, were put to the most cruel tortures. Four of them were exposed to the wild beasts in the amphitheatre to divert the spectators! Blandina was fastened to a post to be eaten up by the beasts, and when they left her untouched, the Marshal haled her to prison again. "But, last of all, St. Blandina, like a well-born mother who has nursed her children and sent them victorious to the King, hastened after them, rejoicing and leaping for joy at her departure ; thrown, indeed, to the wild beasts, she went as if invited to a bridal feast; and after the scourging, after the exposure to wild beasts, after the chair of fire, she was wrapped in a net and tossed by a bull—and at last killed." Others fell with them: Ponticus, a boy of fifteen; Alexander the Phrygian, and many more. They were tortured with cudgels, with whips, with wild beasts, and red-hot plates of iron; at last they died, one by one. The tormentors threw their dead bodies to the dogs: some raged and gnashed their teeth over the dead, seeking to take yet more abundant vengeance thereon; others laughed and made mockery thereof. And others, more gentle, seeming to sympathize as much as they dared, made grievous reproaches, and said, "Where is now their God, and of what profit is their piety, which they loved better even than their own life! Now we shall see if they will ever rise from the dead, and if their God can help and deliver them out of our hands!"