have
divided the fourteen districts of that city among seven notaries,
assigning two districts to each of them, with directions to form a
minute and accurate account of the martyrs who suffered within them.
About one hundred and fifty years from that time, pope Fabian put the
notaries under the care of deacons and subdeacons. The same attention to
the actions and sufferings of the martyrs was shown in the provinces. Of
this, the letter of the church of Smyrna, giving an account of the
martyrdom of St. Polycarp, the letter of the churches of Lyons and
Vienne, giving an account of the martyrs who suffered in those cities;
and the letter of St. Dionysius, the bishop of Alexandra, to Fabius, the
bishop of Antioch, on the martyrs who suffered under the emperor Decius,
are remarkable instances. "Our ancestors," says Pontius, in the
beginning of the acts of St. Cyprian, "held those who suffered
martyrdom, though only catechumens, or of the lowest rank, in such
veneration, as to commit to writing almost every thing that related to
them." Nor was this attention confined to those who obtained the crown
of martyrdom. Care was taken that the lives of all should be written who
were distinguished by their virtues, particularly if they had been
favored with the gift of miracles.

IX. 2. The lives of the martyrs and saints, written in this manner, were
called _their acts_. They were often collected into volumes. One of the
earliest of these {022} collections was made by Eusebius, the father of
church history. Some of the lives he inserted in the body of his great
historical work: he also published a separate collection of them; it was
greatly esteemed, but has not reached our time: many others were
published. These accounts of the virtues and sufferings of the martyrs
were received by the faithful with the highest respect. They considered
them to afford a glorious proof of the truth of the Christian faith, and
of the holiness and sublimity of its doctrines. They felt themselves
stimulated by them to imitate the heroic acts of virtue and constancy
which they placed before their eyes, and to rely on the assistance of
heaven when their own hour of trial should arrive. Thus the vocal blood
of the martyrs was a powerful exhortation, both to induce the infidel to
embrace the faith of Christ, and to incite the faithful to the practice
of its precepts. The church, therefore, always recommended the frequent
reading of the acts of the martyrs,