not only in the reign of so good a man, but even by virtue of his authority; but we must be very uncharitable or very unimaginative if we cannot readily believe that, though they had received the crown of martyrdom from his hands, the redeemed spirits of those great martyrs would have been the first to welcome this holiest of the heathen into the presence of a Saviour whose Church he persecuted, but to whose indwelling Spirit his virtues were due? whom ignorantly and unconsciously he worshipped, and whom had he ever heard of Him and known Him, he would have loved in his heart and glorified by the consistency of his noble and stainless life.

The persecution of the Churches in Lyons and Vienne happened in A.D. 177.  Shortly after this period fresh wars recalled the Emperor to the North.  It is said that, in despair of ever seeing him again, the chief men of Rome entreated him to address them his farewell admonitions, and that for three days he discoursed to them on philosophical questions.  When he arrived at the seat of war, victory again crowned his arms.  But Marcus was now getting old, and he was worn out with the toils, trials, and travels of his long and weary life.  He sunk under mental anxieties and bodily fatigues, and after a brief illness died in Pannonia, either at Vienna or Sirmium, on March 17, A.D. 180, in the fifty-ninth year of his age and the twentieth of his reign.

Death to him was no calamity.  He was sadly aware that “there is no man so fortunate that there shall not be by him when he is dying some who are pleased with what is going to happen.  Suppose that he was a good and wise man, will there not be at last some one to say of him, ’Let us at last breathe freely, being relieved from this schoolmaster.  It is true that he was harsh to none of us, but I perceive that he tacitly condemns us.’...  Thou wilt consider this when thou art dying, and wilt depart more contentedly by reflecting thus:  ’I am going away from a life in which even my associates, on behalf of whom I have striven, and cared, and prayed so much, themselves wish me to depart, hoping perchance to get some little advantage by it.’  Why then should a man cling to a longer stay here? Do not, however, for this reason go away less kindly disposed to them, but preserving thy own character, and continuing friendly, and benevolent, and kind” And dreading death far less than he dreaded any departure from the laws of virtue, he exclaims, “Come quickly, O Death, for fear that at last I should forget myself.”  This utterance has been well compared to the language which Bossuet put into the mouth of a Christian soul:—­“O Death; thou dost not trouble my designs, thou accomplishest them.  Haste, then, O favourable Death!... Nunc Dimittis.”