Page:The early Christians in Rome (1911).djvu/342

 Cecilia was a noble Roman lady, who belonged to a family of senatorial rank; her father apparently was a pagan, or if a Christian at all was a man of the world rather than an earnest believer, for he gave his daughter in marriage to a young patrician, one Valerianus, a pagan, but a pagan of the highest character. Cecilia was a devoted Christian: at once she induced her husband and his brother Tiburtius to abjure idolatry. Accused of Christianity at a moment when the Government of the Emperor Marcus was determined to stamp out the fast-growing religion of Jesus, the two brothers were condemned to death, and they suffered martyrdom in company with the Roman officer who presided at their execution, and who, beholding the constancy of the two young patricians, embraced the faith which had enabled them to witness their good confession.

Cecilia shared in their condemnation. The Government, however, dreading the example of the death of so prominent a personage in Roman society, determined to put her to death as privately as possible. She was doomed to die in her own palace. The furnaces which heated the baths were heated far beyond the usual extent, and Cecilia was exposed to the deadly and suffocating fumes. These failed in their effect: after being exposed in her chamber for a night and a day to these fumes, she was still living, apparently unharmed. The Prefect of the city, who was in charge of Cecilia's execution, then gave orders to a lictor to decapitate the young Christian lady who persistently refused to abjure her religion.

There is nothing improbable in the story, which goes on to relate how the executioner, unnerved with his grim task, inflicted three mortal wounds, but Cecilia, though dying, yet breathed and preserved consciousness.

The Roman law forbade more than three strokes with the sword, and she lived on for two days and nights, during which long protracted agony she was visited by her friends, among whom was a Bishop Urbanus, not the Urbanus Bishop of Rome, as the "Acts" with some confusion tell us, but another Urbanus, probably a prelate of some smaller see.

After she had passed away, her body with all care and reverence was laid in a sepulchral chamber which subse