eelings.

Into such a state as this the truth came boldly, and through such
enemies as these it had to fight its way over such obstacles to make its
slow but sure progress. They who enlisted under her banner had no life
of ease before them. Her trumpet gave forth no uncertain sound. The
conflict was stern, and involved name, and fame, and fortune, and
friends, and life, all that was most dear to man. Ages rolled on. If the
followers of truth increased in number, so also did vice intensify her
power and her malignity; the people sank into deeper corruption, the
state drifted on to more certain ruin.

Then arose those terrible persecutions which aimed to obliterate from
the earth the last vestige of Christianity. A terrible ordeal awaited
the Christian if he resisted the imperial decree; to those who followed
her, the order of Truth was inexorable; and when a decision was made, it
was a final one. To make that decision for Christianity was often to
accept instant death, or else to be driven from the city, banished from
the joys of home and from the light of day.

The hearts of the Romans were hardened and their eyes blinded. Neither
childhood's innocence, nor womanly purity, nor noble manhood, nor the
reverend hairs of age, nor faith immovable, nor love triumphant over
death, could touch them or move them to pity. They did not see the black
cloud of desolation that hovered over the doomed empire, nor know that
from its fury those whom they persecuted alone could save them.

Yet in that reign of terror the Catacombs opened before the Christian
like a city of refuge. Here lay the bones of their fathers who from
generation to generation had fought for the truth, and their worn bodies
waited here for the resurrection morn. Here they brought their
relatives, as one by one they had left them and gone on high. Here the
son had borne the body of his aged mother, and the parent had seen his
child committed to the tomb. Here they had carried the mangled remains
of those who had been torn to pieces by the wild beasts of the arena;
the blackened corpses of those who had been given to the flames; or the
wasted bodies of those most wretched who had sighed out their lives amid
the lingering agonies of death by crucifixion. Every Christian had some
friend or relative lying here in death. The very ground was sanctified,
the very air hallowed. It was not strange that they should seek for
safety in such a place.

Moreover, in these sub