Persecution Result of Covetousness—Steady Growth of Christianity—Story of Saint Cecilia—Dress of a Patrician Woman—A Roman Marriage—Cecilia’s Consecration—Apparition of St. Paul—Cecilia’s Guardian Angel—Conversion of Two Roman Nobles—Slaughter of Christians—A Declaration of Faith—Condemnation of the Nobles.
Time passes on; madmen and sages, dolts and fighters succeed one another on the Imperial Throne, and try to hold together such rags of the Purple as are left to them; one and all agree in looking upon Christianity as a pestilential fad, to be stamped out by any means that come to hand. Some institute official persecutions, some merely leave the governors of cities and provinces to deal with the pest according to their own ideas. Even the most careless or the most indulgent never revoke the ancient edicts of proscription, and these edicts are always there in reserve to strengthen the hand of any man in authority, who, for his own ends, desires to destroy and confiscate. For it must be remembered that in the Roman Empire, from the First to the Fourth Century, even as in England under Henry and Elizabeth and their successors, persecution was mostly the result of covetousness, and that the insane law adjudging the property of the condemned to those who procured their conviction was the same in both cases and constituted an appeal to selfish passions far too strong to go unused.
The more energetic or less vicious of the Emperors spent but little time in Rome itself after the middle of the Second Century; the safety of the Empire, surrounded by a fringe of enemies and barbarians, constantly required their presence elsewhere, and so the supreme municipal power fell almost completely into the hands of the governors, men who had rarely reached that prominence honestly and who made haste to reap their private harvest as rapidly as possible. Such an one was a certain Turcius Almachius who became the Prefect of the city under Alexander Severus in the early part of the Third Century. Alexander is generally described as a fair-minded and indulgent man, who, though he permitted the edicts of proscription to remain on the statute books, had no personal hostility to the Christians and did not consider that their existence constituted a menace to the State. Perhaps he thought enough had been done already to annihilate their claims, and believed that the “superstition,” as it was called, would die a natural death. And, all the time, Christianity was growing to be a great force, nullifying the sentence of death pronounced upon it, by the solid irresistible pressure of its own vitality, even as the tender shoot sprung from an acorn will at last rend and shatter the heavy tombstone beneath which it lay.