We have then now traced up to the end of the third century the inner growth and constituent principles of that great institution, which out of every language, tribe, and religion in the empire or beyond it had formed and welded together one people, the bearer of that Truth and that Grace which the Son of God in assuming manhood had conveyed to the world. It remains rapidly to review the relations of the empire with this people during seventy-eight years, from the death of Alexander Severus in 235 to the edict of toleration in 313.
II. The seizure of the empire by Maximin was accompanied by a violent attack upon Christians, whom Alexander was held to have favoured. It is on this occasion that we learn from Origen(300) that churches were burnt, and thus their existence as public buildings is attested. The clergy were especially threatened, and amongst them Ambrosius, the friend of Origen, and Origen himself. But Maximin after reigning three years with extraordinary cruelty was slain by his own soldiers. And then during eleven years a period of comparative tranquillity for Christians ensued.
It is with the accession of Decius that the severest trials of the Church commence. In the sixty-four years which elapse from this to the edict of toleration, the force of the empire is five times directed by its rulers against the Christian name. The cause of this is disclosed to us by S. Cyprian mentioning incidentally the very words of that emperor whose name is associated with the bitterest hatred to Christians. He praises Pope Cornelius,(301) who when Pope "Fabian's place, that is," he says, "the place of Peter and the rank of the sacerdotal chair was vacant," "sat fearless in that chair at Rome at the moment when the tyrant who hated God's priests uttered every horrible threat, and with much more patience and endurance heard the rise of a rival prince than the appointment of God's priest at Rome." But why should Decius regard with such dislike the nomination of a Roman Bishop? Why, but that the emperors had now come clearly to discern the organisation of the Church as a visible kingdom of Christ, at the head of which the Roman Bishop stood. That kingdom, the whole moral and religious doctrine of which, together with the life founded upon it, they felt to be in contradiction with the heathen life and the maxims of polity on which from time immemorial the empire had been based, that kingdom Decius saw to be summed up and represented in him who held, to use the words of Cyprian, "Peter's place." With that religious association which Decius saw extending round him on every side, and gradually drawing into its bosom the best of the two sexes, there was no way of dealing but either to yield to those new maxims which it set forth, or to destroy it. In proportion as the emperors were zealous for the worship of the Roman gods, and instinct with the old discipline of the state, they inclined to the latter alternative, and none more decisively than Decius, who prided himself on following the spirit of Trajan. The persecution which he set on foot reached and slew Pope Fabian, and caused the election of a successor to be deferred for sixteen months. When at the end of that time Cornelius was chosen, Cyprian praises him "as to be reckoned among the glorious confessors and martyrs, who sat so long awaiting his butchers, ready either to slay him with the sword, or crucify him, or burn him, or tear open and maim his body with any unheard-of kind of punishment."(302) Decius indeed was slain by the Goths in battle after less than two years' reign, but the persecution was renewed by Gallus, and again by Valerian, so that in ten years no less than five Pontiffs, holding that place of Peter, Fabian, Cornelius, Lucius, Stephen, and Sistus, offered up their lives for the faith. Then it was that the ten years' noble episcopate of S. Cyprian after many minor sufferings ended in martyrdom: and then too the deacon Laurence wore out in the agony of fire all the malignity of the enemy, and gained his almost matchless crown.(303)