A letter, written by an eye-witness, pictures with terrible vividness the scenes which followed.  Many cases are described with harrowing detail, and of one Blandina it is said:  “From morn till eve they put her to all manner of torture, marvelling that she still lived with her body pierced through and through and torn piecemeal by so many tortures, of which a single one should have sufficed to kill her; to which she only replied, ‘I am a Christian.’”

The recital goes on to tell how she was then cast into a dungeon—­her feet compressed and dragged out to the utmost tension of the muscles—­then left alone in darkness until new methods of torture could be devised.

Finally she was brought, with other Christians, into the amphitheatre, hanging from a Cross to which she was tied, and there thrown to the beasts.  As the beasts refused to touch her she was taken back to the dungeon to be reserved for another occasion, being brought out daily to witness the fate and suffering of her friends and fellow-martyrs; still answering the oft-repeated question, “I am a Christian.”

The writer goes on to say, “After she had undergone fire, the talons of beasts, and every agony which could be thought of, she was wrapped in a network and thrown to a bull, who tossed her in the air”—­and her sufferings were ended.

Truly it cost something to say “I am a Christian” in those days.

Marcus Aurelius probably gave orders for the persecution at Lyons, with little knowledge of what would be the nature of those persecutions, or of the religion he was trying to exterminate.  Some of the hours spent in writing introspective essays would have been well employed in studying the period in which he lived, and the empire he ruled.

Paganism and Druidism, those twin monsters, receded before the advancing light of Christianity.  Neither contained anything which could nourish the soul of man, and both had become simply badges of nationality.

Druidism was the last stronghold of independent Gallic life.  It was a mixture of northern myth and oriental dreams of metempsychosis, coarse, mystical, and cruel.  The Roman paganism which was superimposed by the conquering race was the mere shell of a once vital religion.  Educated men had long ceased to believe in the gods and divinities of Greece, and it is said that the Roman augurs, while giving their solemn prophetic utterances, could not look at each other without laughing.

In the year 312—­alas for Christianity!—­it was espoused by imperial power.  When the Emperor Constantine declared himself a Christian, there was no doubt rejoicing among the saints; but it was the beginning of the degeneracy of the religion of Christ.  The faith of the humble was to be raised to a throne; its lowly garb to be exchanged for purple and scarlet; the gospel of peace to be enforced by the sword.

The empire was crumbling, and upon its ruins the race of the future and social conditions of modern times were forming.  Paganism and Druidism would have been an impossibility.  Christianity, even with its lustre dimmed, its purity tarnished, its simplicity overlaid with scholasticism, was better than these.  The miracle had been accomplished.  The great Roman Empire had said, “I am Christian.”