as ever estimated greatness. When the news of his assassination reached
Rome, the first sensation was that of escape, relief, deliverance; with
the Christians, and all who favored them, though not of their faith, it
was undissembled joy. The streets presented the appearances which
accompany an occasion of general rejoicing. Life seemed all at once more
secure. Another bloody tyrant was dead, by the violence which he had
meted out to so many others, and they were glad. But with another part
of the Roman people it was far otherwise. They lamented him as the
greatest soldier Rome had known since Caesar; as the restorer of the
empire; as the stern but needful reformer of a corrupt and degenerate
age; as one who to the army had been more than another Vespasian; who,
as a prince, if sometimes severe, was always just, generous, and
magnanimous. These were they, who, caring more for the dead than for the
living, will remember concerning them only that which is good. They
recounted his virtues and his claims to admiration--which were
unquestionable and great--and forgot, as if they had never been, his
deeds of cruelty, and the wide and wanton slaughter of thousands and
hundreds of thousands, which will ever stamp him as one destitute of
humanity, and whose almost only title to the name of man was, that he
was in the shape of one. For how can the possession of a few of those
captivating qualities, which so commonly accompany the possession of
great power, atone for the rivers of blood which flowed wherever he
wound his way?

* * * * *

I have now ended what I proposed to myself. I have arranged and
connected some of the letters of Lucius Manlius Piso, having selected
chiefly those which related to the affairs of the Christians and their
sufferings during the last days of Aurelian's reign. Those days were
happily few. And when they were passed, I deemed that never again, so
fast did the world appear to grow wiser and better could the same
horrors be repeated. But it was not so; and under Diocletian I beheld
that work in a manner perfected, which Aurelian did but begin. I have
outlived the horrors of those times, and at length, under the powerful
protection of the great Constantine, behold this much-persecuted faith
secure. In this I sincerely rejoice, for it is Christianity alone, of
all the religions of the world, to which may be safely intrusted the
destinies of mankind.

END.

End of