Page:The World's Famous Orations Volume 7.djvu/74

 CALVIN

ON SUFFERING PERSECUTION

is true that persons may be found who will foolishly expose themselves to death in maintaining some absurd opinions and reveries conceived by their own brain, but such impetuosity is more to be regarded as frenzy than as Christian zeal; and, in fact, there is neither firmness nor sound sense in those who thus, at a kind of haphazard, cast themseves away. But, however this may be, it is in a good cause only that God can acknowledge us as His martyrs. Death is common to all, and the children of God are condemned to ignominy and tortures just as criminals are; but God makes the distinction between them, inasmuch as He can not deny His truth.

On our part, then, it is requisite that we have sure and infallible evidence of the doctrine which we maintain; and hence, as I have said,