Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 6.djvu/114

Rh churches of Boston may write a letter to-day, which three or four thousand years hence will sound as strange as now the Epistle of St. Irenaeus. Sixteen hundred and seventy-six years hence, it may be thought the Marshal's "guard" is a fair match for the bullies who tortured Blandina. In the next world the District Marshal may shake hands with the heathen murderer who put the boy Ponticus to cruel death. I make no doubt there were men at the corners of the streets who clapped hands, as one by one the lions in the public square rent the Christian maidens limb from limb, and strewed the ground with human flesh yet palpitating in its severed agony. Boston can furnish mates for them. But the Judge of Probate, the teacher of a Sunday-school, the member of a church of Christ,—he may wander through all Hades, peopled thick with Roman tormentors, nor never meet with a heathen guardian of orphans who can be his match. Let him pass by. Declamation can add nothing to his deed.

No doubt the commissioner for murdering the Christians at Vienna reasoned as "legally" and astutely in the second century as the Fugitive Slave Bill Commissioner at Boston in the nineteenth. Perhaps the "argument" was after this wise:— "This statute has been decided to be constitutional by the unanimous opinion of the Judges of the Supreme Court of the Province of Gaul, after the fullest argument and the maturest deliberation, to be the law of this province, as well as and because it is a constitutional law of the Roman Empire; and the wise words of our revered chief-justice may well be repeated now, and remembered always. The chief-justice says:—

"'The torture, persecution, and murder of Christians was not created, established, or perpetuated by the consti-