ct, in
case they knew the facts of our religion. Twenty-two books of the New
Testament were written before the martyrdom of the Apostles Paul and
Peter. Infidels often boast, in their ignorance, that the books of the
gospels were not written by those whose names they bear.

If Matthew, Mark, Luke and John did not write those books which bear
their names, then are they false in fact? and if so, what did the
authors die for? The sufferings of primitive Christians were great; the
persecutions which they endured were outrageous, cruel and inhuman in
their character. Such is the universal verdict of ancient history. Of
the persecution under Nero, Tacitus, a celebrated Roman historian, who
was born in the year 56, just twenty-three years after Pentecost,
writes, that Nero "laid upon the Christians the charge of that terrible
conflagration at Rome of which he himself was the cause." He says, "A
vast multitude were apprehended. And many were disguised in the skins of
wild beasts and worried to death by dogs, some were crucified, and
others were wrapped in pitched shirts and set on fire when the day
closed, that they might serve as lights to illuminate the night. Nero
lent his own garden for these executions, and celebrated at the same
time a public entertainment in the circus, being a spectator of the
whole in the dress of a charioteer, sometimes mingling with the crowd on
foot, and sometimes viewing the spectacle from his car." (Annals of
Tacitus, 15: 44.)

Juvenal, the coarse and bitter satirist of the same time, writes of the
martyred Christians as "those who stand burning in their own flame and
smoke, their head being held up by a stake fixed to their chin, till
they make a long stream of blood and sulphur on the ground." (Juv. Sat.,
1: 155.)

Seneca also refers to their fearful sufferings: "Imagine here a prison,
crosses and racks and the hook, and a stake thrust through the body and
coming out at the mouth, and the limbs torn by chariots pulling adverse
ways, and the coat besmeared and interwoven with inflammable materials,
nutriment for fire, and whatever else beside _these_ cruelty has
invented." (Seneca's Epistles, 14.)

One of Diocletian's coins commemorates the blotting out of the very name
of Christian: "Nomine Christianorum deleto." But the age of martyrdoms
ended with the accession of Constantine to the Roman empire, and to-day
there are more Christians in the world than ever before. Skeptic, take
one long lo