to entreat, them, that they would show some compassion to themselves, to
their families, and to their friends. If threats and persuasions proved
ineffectual, he had often recourse to violence; the scourge and the rack
were called in to supply the deficiency of argument, and every art of
cruelty was employed to subdue such inflexible, and, as it appeared
to the Pagans, such criminal, obstinacy. The ancient apologists of
Christianity have censured, with equal truth and severity, the irregular
conduct of their persecutors who, contrary to every principle of
judicial proceeding, admitted the use of torture, in order to obtain,
not a confession, but a denial, of the crime which was the object of
their inquiry. The monks of succeeding ages, who, in their peaceful
solitudes, entertained themselves with diversifying the deaths and
sufferings of the primitive martyrs, have frequently invented torments
of a much more refined and ingenious nature. In particular, it has
pleased them to suppose, that the zeal of the Roman magistrates,
disdaining every consideration of moral virtue or public decency,
endeavored to seduce those whom they were unable to vanquish, and that
by their orders the most brutal violence was offered to those whom they
found it impossible to seduce. It is related, that females, who were
prepared to despise death, were sometimes condemned to a more severe
trial, and called upon to determine whether they set a higher value
on their religion or on their chastity. The youths to whose licentious
embraces they were abandoned, received a solemn exhortation from the
judge, to exert their most strenuous efforts to maintain the honor of
Venus against the impious virgin who refused to burn incense on her
altars. Their violence, however, was commonly disappointed, and the
seasonable interposition of some miraculous power preserved the chaste
spouses of Christ from the dishonor even of an involuntary defeat. We
should not indeed neglect to remark, that the more ancient as well
as authentic memorials of the church are seldom polluted with these
extravagant and indecent fictions.

The total disregard of truth and probability in the representation of
these primitive martyrdoms was occasioned by a very natural mistake. The
ecclesiastical writers of the fourth or fifth centuries ascribed to the
magistrates of Rome the same degree of implacable and unrelenting zeal
which filled their own breasts against the heretics or the idolater