rom a consular family, and
possessed of so ample an estate, that it required the management of
seventy-three stewards. Among these Boniface was the favorite of his
mistress; and as Aglae mixed love with devotion, it is reported that he
was admitted to share her bed. Her fortune enabled her to gratify
the pious desire of obtaining some sacred relics from the East. She
intrusted Boniface with a considerable sum of gold, and a large quantity
of aromatics; and her lover, attended by twelve horsemen and three
covered chariots, undertook a remote pilgrimage, as far as Tarsus in
Cilicia.

The sanguinary temper of Galerius, the first and principal author of the
persecution, was formidable to those Christians whom their misfortunes
had placed within the limits of his dominions; and it may fairly be
presumed that many persons of a middle rank, who were not confined by
the chains either of wealth or of poverty, very frequently deserted
their native country, and sought a refuge in the milder climate of
the West. As long as he commanded only the armies and provinces of
Illyricum, he could with difficulty either find or make a considerable
number of martyrs, in a warlike country, which had entertained the
missionaries of the gospel with more coldness and reluctance than any
other part of the empire. But when Galerius had obtained the supreme
power, and the government of the East, he indulged in their fullest
extent his zeal and cruelty, not only in the provinces of Thrace and
Asia, which acknowledged his immediate jurisdiction, but in those
of Syria, Palestine, and Egypt, where Maximin gratified his own
inclination, by yielding a rigorous obedience to the stern commands of
his benefactor. The frequent disappointments of his ambitious views,
the experience of six years of persecution, and the salutary reflections
which a lingering and painful distemper suggested to the mind of
Galerius, at length convinced him that the most violent efforts of
despotism are insufficient to extirpate a whole people, or to subdue
their religious prejudices. Desirous of repairing the mischief that he
had occasioned, he published in his own name, and in those of Licinius
and Constantine, a general edict, which, after a pompous recital of the
Imperial titles, proceeded in the following manner:--

"Among the important cares which have occupied our mind for the utility
and preservation of the empire, it was our intention to correct
and reestablish all thing