post to which God has called him, like the monks and nuns of old.  We believe that the numbers of the early martyrs have been exaggerated.  We believe that they were like ourselves, imperfect and inconsistent human beings; that, on the showing of the legends and fathers themselves, their testimony for the truth was too often impaired by superstition, fanaticism, or passion.  But granting all this, we must still say, in the words of one who cannot be suspected of Romanising—­the great Dr. Arnold—­

Divide the sum total of reported martyrs by twenty; by fifty, if you will; after all, you have a number of persons of all ages and sexes suffering cruel torments and deaths for conscience’ sake, and for Christ’s; and by their sufferings, manifestly with God’s blessing, insuring the triumph of Christ’s Gospel.  Neither do I think that we consider the excellence of this martyr spirit half enough.

Indeed we do not.  Let all the abatements mentioned above, and more, be granted; yet, even then, when we remember that the world from which Jerome or Anthony fled was even worse than that denounced by Juvenal and Persius—­that the nuptials which, as legends say, were often offered the virgin martyrs as alternatives for death, were such as employed the foul pens of Petronius and Martial—­that the tyrants whom they spurned were such as live in the pages of Suetonius, and the Augustae Historiae Scriptores—­that the gods whom they were commanded to worship, the rites in which they were to join, were those over which Ovid and Apuleius had gloated, which Lucian had held up to the contempt of heathendom itself—­that the tortures which they preferred to apostacy and to foul crimes were, by the confessions of the heathens themselves, too horrible for pen to tell—­it does raise a flush of indignation to hear some sleek bigot-sceptic, bred up in the safety and luxury of modern England, among Habeas Corpus Acts and endowed churches, trying from his warm fireside to sneer away the awful responsibilities and the heroic fortitude of valiant men and tender girls, to whose piety and courage he owes the very enlightenment, the very civilisation, of which he boasts.

It is an error, doubtless, and a fearful one, to worship even such as them.  But the error, when it arose, was at worst the caricature of a blessed truth.  Even for the sinful, surely it was better to admire holiness than to worship their own sin.  Shame on those who, calling themselves Christians, repine that a Cecilia or a Magdalen replaced an Isis and a Venus; or who can fancy that they are serving Protestantism by tracing malevolent likenesses between even the idolatry of a saint and the idolatry of a devil!  True, there was idolatry in both, as gross in one as the other.  And what wonder?  What wonder if, amid a world of courtesans, the nun was worshipped?  At least God allowed it; and will man be wiser than God?  “The times of that ignorance He winked at.”  The lie that was in it He did not interfere to punish.  He did more; He let it work out, as all lies will, their own punishment.  We may see that in the miserable century which preceded the glorious Reformation; we may see it in the present state of Spain and Italy.  The crust of lies, we say, punished itself; to the germ of truth within it we partly owe that we are Christian men this day.