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f 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. B