and mind. Temperament also combined with these influences to deepen and extend the peculiarities of the Christian converts. Hence the materialism of Hermas and Tertullian, who believed in the regenerative power of water; the spiritualism of Justin Martyr, Clement, (of Alexandria,) and Origen, with their Platonic notions and symbolic interpretations; as, also, the various errors of the Gnostics and the Manichees, who mingled the truths of Christianity with their theosophic dreams, their pleromas and æons.

The age, too, was credulous and superstitious. Freedom and independence in matters of government and discipline were almost unknown. Thousands of converts, among them many teachers and preachers, were ignorant and superstitious. Hence the multiplication of forms and ceremonies, and the vast importance attached to external acts, to chrisms and genuflections, amulets and charms.

Nevertheless, the revolution in the views and manners of the converted heathen was immense. Idol worship was abandoned, and the one true and eternal Jehovah was loved and adored. The heart was cleansed of its idolatry and lust, the life of its folly and crime. It is well known, that among the heathen, a virtuous woman was a great rarity; among the Christian females,

continence was the rule, vice the exception. Charity and chastity were the noble graces of the primitive church.

The contrast between the manners of the Christians and those of the heathen was obvious to all. The following description, in a letter of Cyprian, is by no means exaggerated. Writing to his friend Donatus, he says, "Imagine yourself raised above the earth, and looking down upon it, so as to perceive what is going on there. Behold the roads obstructed by bands of robbers; the sea beset with pirates; war every where! The very earth is wet with blood, and what is called murder, when committed by a private individual, is virtue when it is done by many; impunity being secured, not by the smallness, but by the greatness of the offence. If you turn your eyes to the cities, then you will find their very magnitude more offensive than the most wretched solitude. There gladiatorial shows are exhibited to gratify the lust of blood. Man is slaughtered for the pleasure of man; he who best knows how to kill is the most skilful; it is a trade, an art. The crime is not only perpetrated, but it is taught. What can be more inhuman? They combat with beasts, not as criminals, but from brute fury: sons behold their father, the sister sees the brother, in the amphitheatre.

"Turn your eyes to spectacles of another kind, not less repulsive and corrupting. In the theatre, the most vicious representations, parricide and incest reproduced in all their horror. Look at the comic actor, the very schoolmaster of vice. Adultery is learned by seeing it acted! The theatre panders to vice, and breaks down the modesty of women. What an incitement to vice in the gestures of the actors, who undertake to represent the whole course of sensual indulgence! If, from this, you could look into the retirement of the closed chamber, and see what is there transacted! But your eyes would be defiled by beholding it."

Cyprian then proceeds, in deepening colors, to depict still more horrible crimes, public and private, in the forum, the baths, the theatres, the places of public concourse, to some of which we have no parallel in modern times, crimes which it is impossible for us to repeat, difficult for us to conceive. Indeed, he describes that state of society, to which St. Paul, in his Epistle to the Romans, refers, as the most degraded and bestial.

All this, however, the early Christians renounced. Theatres, gladiatorial shows, popular amusements, the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eye, and the pride of life they abandoned in their baptism. They deserted the temples of the gods, and gave themselves to the cultivation of piety

and virtue. Tested by the most powerful temptations, sometimes by appalling deaths, some yielded, but yielded reluctantly and with horror. This is freely admitted by the Christian fathers and church historians. But it is precisely what might have been expected. But many repented, while the great body of believers nobly stood the test. They preferred death to dishonor. Their purity, their fidelity, their triumphant faith. astonished even the heathen. They gloried in the cross. Christ was in their souls, as strength and peace eternal, and willingly, nay, cheerfully, they passed through fire and blood, agony and disolution, to the glory of martyrdom. "Your cruelty," says Tertullian, addressing the heathen ruler, "will be our glory. Thousands of both sexes, and of every rank, will eagerly crowd to martyrdom, exhaust your fires, and weary your swords. Carthage must be decimated; the principal persons in the city, even perhaps your own most intimate friends and kindred, must be sacrificed. Vainly will you war against God. Magistrates are but men, and will suffer the common lot of mortality; but Christianity will endure as long as the Roman empire, and the duration of the empire will be coeval with that of the world." Look, for example, at the sublime serenity and triumph of that youthful company, Revocatus and Felicitas, Saturninus and

Secundulus, catechumens, and Viva Perpetua, a woman of good family and liberal education, and honorably married, who turned away from all human bribes, and gave themselves to the fury of the wild beasts. Entreated by the prayers and tears of an aged father to abandon her faith, Perpetua clung to the cross, amid shame, agony, and death. In prison and among the wild beasts, with her young child in her arms, she maintained her dignity and composure, as if she were an angel rather that a feeble woman. "When taken out to execution, they declined, and were permitted to decline, the profane dress in which they were to be clad; the men that of the priests of Saturn, the women that of the priestesses of Ceres. They came forward in their simple attire, Perpetua singing psalms. The men were exposed to leopards and bears; the women were hung up naked in nets, to be gored by a furious cow. But even the excited populace shrunk with horror at the spectacle of two young and delicate women, one recently recovered from child birth, in this state. They were recalled by acclamation, and in mercy brought forward again clad in loose robes. Perpetua was tossed, her garment was rent; but more conscious of her wounded modesty than of pain, she drew the robe over the part of her person that was exposed. She then calmly clasped