Page:The early Christians in Rome (1911).djvu/225

 Christian, reminds us of the golden days of Latin prose so much as the Octavius of Minucius Felix" (Hist. of Christianity, book iv. chap. iii.).

The following striking passages bearing on the subject of the ceaseless persecution to which the Christians were subjected in the middle years of the second century are taken from the thirty-seventh chapter of the Dialogue:

"How beautiful before God is the spectacle of a Christian entering into the lists with pain, when he is matched against threats and punishments and tortures; when, deriding the noise of death, he treads under foot the horror of the public executioner; when he raises up his liberty in opposition to kings and princes, and yields to God alone, whose he is; when, triumphant and a victor, he tramples upon the very man who has pronounced sentence against him! For he has conquered who has won that for which he fights But God's soldier is neither forsaken in suffering, nor is he brought to an end by death. Thus the Christian may seem to be miserable, he cannot really be found to be so. You yourselves extol unfortunate men to the skies. Mucius Scævola, for instance, who, when he had failed in his attempts against the king, would have perished had he not sacrificed his right hand. And how many of our people have endured that not only their right hand but that their whole body should be burned—burned without a cry of pain—though they had it in their power to be freed!

"Do I compare Christian men with Mucius or even with Regulus? Yet boys and young girls mock at crosses and tortures, wild beasts and all the terrors of punishment—with all the inspired patience of suffering" (Minucius Felix, cap. xxxvii.).

,  170

Very little is known of this Melito; he was evidently a somewhat voluminous writer, but only few fragments remain of the long list of his works which Eusebius has given (H.E. Book vi. 26). In one of these fragments of a discourse, addressed to the Emperor Marcus, the following passage occurs: