e Christian church still
stands--not unharmed, but founded as before upon a rock, against which
the powers of earth and hell can never prevail; and soon as this storm
shall have overblown, those other, and now secret, multitudes, of whom I
speak, will come forth, and the wilderness of the church shall blossom
again as a garden in the time of spring. God is working with us, and
who therefore can prevail against us!

'Bring not then, Aurelian, upon your own soul; bring not upon Rome, the
guilt that would attend this unnecessary slaughter. It can but defer for
an hour or a day the establishment of that kingdom of righteousness,
which must be established, because it is God's, and he is laying its
foundations and building its walls. Have pity too, great Emperor, upon
this large multitude of those who embrace this faith, and who will not
let it go for all the terrors of your courts and judges and engines;
they will all suffer the death of Macer ere they will prove false to
their Master. Let not the horrors of that scene be renewed, nor the
greater ones of an indiscriminate massacre. I implore your compassions,
not for myself, but for these many thousands, who, by my ministry, have
been persuaded to receive this faith. For them my heart bleeds; them I
would save from the death which impends. Yet it is a glorious and a
happy death, to die for truth and Christ! It is better to die so,
knowing that by such death the very church itself is profited, than to
die in one's own bed, and only to one's self. So do these thousands
think; and whatever compassion I may implore for them, they would each
and all, were such their fate, go with cheerful step, as those who went
to some marriage supper, to the axe, to the stake, or the cross.
Christianity cannot die but with the race itself. Its life is bound up
in the life of man, and man must be destroyed ere that can perish.
Behold then, Aurelian, the labor that is thine!'

Soon as he had ceased, Porphyrius started from his seat and said,

'It is then, O Romans, just as it has ever been affirmed. The Galileans
are atheists! They believe not in the gods of Rome, nor in any in whom
mankind can ever have belief. I doubt not but they think themselves
believers in a God. They think themselves to have found one better than
others have; but upon any definition, that I or you could give or
understand, of atheism, they are atheists! Their God is invisible; he is
a universal spirit, like this circumam