services I had rendered
him.

'Me?' said he, and his head fell upon his bosom. 'What have I done for
Christ to deserve the thanks of any? I have preached and I have prayed;
I have opposed heresies and errors; I have wrestled with the enemies and
corrupters of our faith within our own body and without; but the fruit
seems nothing. The gentile is still omnipotent--heresy and error still
abound.'

'Yes, Macer,' I replied, 'that is certainly so, and may be so for many
years to come, but still we are gaining. He who can remember twenty
years can count a great increase. After the testimony borne by the
martyrs of the Decian persecution to their faith, and all the proof they
gave of sincere attachment to the doctrine of Christ, crowds have
entered the church, an hundred for every one whose blood then flowed.'

'And now,' said Macer, his eye kindling with its wild fires, 'the church
is dead! The truest prayer that the Christian can now offer is, that it
would please God to try us again as it were by fire! We slumber, Piso!
The Christians are not now the Nazarites they were in the first age of
the church. Divisions have crept in; tares have been sown with the
wheat, and have come up, and are choking the true plants of God. I know
not but that the signs of terror which are scaring the heavens ought
rather to be hailed as tokens of love. Better a thousand perish on the
rack or by the axe, than that the church itself faint away and die.'

'It will not do,' said Probus, 'always to depend upon such remedies of
our sloth and heresies. Surely it were better to prosper in some other
and happier way. All I think we can say of persecution, and of the
oppositions of our enemies, is this, that if it be in the providence of
God that they cannot be avoided, we have cause to bless him that their
issue is good rather than evil; that they serve as tests by which the
genuine is tried and proved; that they give the best and highest
testimony to the world that man can give, of his sincerity; that they
serve to bind together into one compact and invincible phalanx the
disciples of our common master, however in many things they may divide
and separate. But, were it not better, if we could attain an equal good
without the suffering?'

'I believe that to be impossible,' said Macer. 'Since Jesus began his
ministry, persecution has been the rod that has been laid upon the
church without sparing, and the fruit has been abundant. Without it,
like th