rvellous occurrences, that no trust is possible in anything which
they say. Not only was St. Paul's head cut off, but the worthy Bishop of
Rome, Linus, his contemporary (who is supposed to relate his martyrdom),
tells us how, "instead of blood, nought but a stream of pure milk flowed
from his veins;" and we are further instructed that his severed head
took three jumps in "honour of the Trinity, and at each spot on which it
jumped there instantly struck up a spring of living water, which retains
at this day a plain and distinct taste of milk" ("Diegesis," pp. 256,
257). Against a mass of absurd stories of this kind, the _only evidence_
of the persecution of Paley's eye-witnesses, we may set the remarks of
Gibbon: "In the time of Tertullian and Clemens of Alexandria the glory
of martyrdom was confined to St. Peter, St. Paul, and St. James. It was
gradually bestowed on the rest of the Apostles by the more recent
Greeks, who prudently selected for the theatre of their preaching and
sufferings some remote country beyond the limits of the Roman Empire"
("Decline and Fall," vol. ii., p. 208, note). Later there was, indeed,
more persecution; but even then the martyrdoms afford no evidence of the
truth of Christianity. Martyrdom proves the sincerity, _but not the
truth_, of the sufferer's belief; every creed has had its martyrs, and
as the truth of one creed excludes the truth of every other, it follows
that the vast majority have died for a delusion, and that, therefore,
the number of martyrs it can reckon is no criterion of the truth of a
creed, but only of the devotion it inspires. While we allow that the
Christians underwent much persecution, there can be no doubt that the
number of the sufferers has been grossly exaggerated. One can scarcely
help suspecting that, as real martyrs were not forthcoming in as vast
numbers as their supposed bones, martyrs were invented to fit the
wealth-producing relics, as the relics did not fit the historical
martyrs. "The total disregard of truth and probability in the
representations of these primitive martyrdoms was occasioned by a very
natural mistake. The ecclesiastical writers of the fourth and 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 idolaters of their own time.... But it is certain,
and we may appeal to the grateful confessions of the first Christians,
that the greate