than
common interest and necessity to large circles of relatives and
dependents. I have aimed to make them believe, that little gain would
accrue to the cause of Christ from the addition of them and theirs to
the mass of sufferers--when that mass is already so large; whereas great
and irreparable loss would follow to the community of their friends, and
of the Christians who should survive. They would do an equal service to
Christ and his church by living, and, on the first appearance of calmer
times, reassuming their Christian name and profession; being then a
centre about which there might gather together a new multitude of
believers. If still the enemies of Christ should prevail, and a day of
rest never dawn nor arise, they might then, when hope was dead, come
forth and add themselves to the innumerable company of those, born of
Heaven, who hold life and all its joys and comforts as dross, in
comparison with the perfect integrity of the mind. By such statements
have I prevailed with many. Probus too has exerted his power in the same
direction, and has enjoyed the happiness of seeing safely embarked for
Greece, or Syria, many whose lives in the coming years will be beyond
price to the then just-surviving church.

Yet do not imagine, Fausta, that we are an immaculate people; that the
weaknesses and faults which seem universal to mankind, are not to be
discovered in us that we are all, what by our acknowledged principles we
ought to be. We have our traitors and our renegades, our backsliders,
and our well-dissembling hypocrites--but so few are they, that they give
us little disquiet, and bring slight discredit upon us with the enemy.
And beside these, there will now be those, as in former persecutions,
who, as the day of evil approaches, will, through the operation simply
of their fears, renounce their name and faith. Of the former, some have
already made themselves conspicuous--conspicuous now by their cowardly
and hasty apostacy, as they were before by a narrow, contentious, and
restless zeal. Among others, the very one, who, on the evening when the
Christians assembled near the baths of Macer, was so forward to assail
the faith of Probus, and who ever before, on other occasions, when a
display could by any possibility be made of devotion to his party, or an
ostentatious parade of his love of Christ, was always thrusting himself
upon the notice of our body and clamoring for notoriety, has already
abandoned us and sough