Page:The early Christians in Rome (1911).djvu/192

 leave scanty room for the sword of the executioner." "Dear sisters, let us meditate on hardships, then when they come to us we shall not feel them; let us give up luxuries and we shall not regret them; for Christians now, remember, pass their time not in gold, but in iron. At this moment are the angels weaving for you robes of martyrdom."

But in return for all this, Christianity offered much—in truth, a splendid guerdon for the life of sacrifice. In the first place, the Christian was delivered from the dread spectre which constantly haunted the life of the pagan—the fear of death. Throughout life, sleeping and waking, to the pagan of all ranks and orders, death was an enemy. What the men of the pagan Empire in the early Christian centuries felt in respect of the great universal foe—what they thought of it—is well shown in the epitaphs on the pagan tombs of the first, second, and third centuries.

Complete freedom from this ever-present dread was the immediate reward received by the believer: so far was death from being an enemy, that to the Christian it appeared as the best and most longed for friend. Again and again the Church was compelled to restrain rather than to encourage candidates for martyrdom. From Paul, who wrote how "he desired to depart and be with Christ, which was far better" (Phil. i. 23); from Ignatius, whose passionate desire for a martyr's death appears and reappears, in his Letter to the Romans, in such words as "it is good for me to die for Jesus Christ, rather than to reign over the farthest bounds of the earth"; "Suffer me to receive the pure light when I come thither, then I shall be a man indeed"; "Let me be an imitator of the passion of my God" (To the Romans, vi.); from the thousand epitaphs in the catacomb tombs, which we can still read, we gather this knowledge—the absolute freedom of the Christian from that fear of death which weighed so heavily upon all pagan society.

The very expressions used by the disciples of the first