ging against them; they cast to the dogs
the bodies of those who had died of suffocation in prison, and watched
night and day that none of our brethren might come and bury them. As for
what remained of the martyrs' half-mangled or devoured corpses, they left
them exposed under a guard of soldiers, coming to look on them with
insulting eyes, and saying, 'Where is now their God? Of what use to them
was this religion for which they laid down their lives?' We were
overcome with grief that we were not able to bury these poor corpses; nor
the darkness of night, nor gold, nor prayers could help us to succeed
therein. After being thus exposed for six days in the open air, given
over to all manner of outrage, the corpses of the martyrs were at last
burned, reduced to ashes, and cast hither and thither by the infidels
upon the waters of the Rhone, that there might be left no trace of them
on earth. They acted as if they had been more mighty than God, and could
rob our brethren of their resurrection: ''Tis in that hope,' said they,
'that these folk bring amongst us a new and strange religion, that they
set at nought the most painful torments, and that they go joyfully to
face death: let us see if they will rise again, if their God will come to
their aid and will be able to tear them from our hands.'"

It is not without a painful effort that, even after so many centuries,
we can resign ourselves to be witnesses, in imagination only, of such a
spectacle. We can scarce believe that amongst men of the same period and
the same city so much ferocity could be displayed in opposition to so
much courage, the passion for barbarity against the passion for virtue.
Nevertheless, such is history; and it should be represented as it really
was: first of all, for truth's sake; then for the due appreciation of
virtue and all it costs of effort and sacrifice; and, lastly, for the
purpose of showing what obstacles have to be surmounted, what struggles
endured, and what sufferings borne, when the question is the
accomplishment of great moral and social reforms. Marcus Aurelius was,
without any doubt, a virtuous ruler, and one who had it in his heart to
be just and humane; but he was an absolute ruler, that is to say, one fed
entirely on his owns ideas, very ill-informed about the facts on which he
had to decide, and without a free public to warn him of the errors of his
ideas or the practical results of his decrees. He ordered the
persecution o