PERSECUTION means any pain or affliction which one person designedly inflicts upon another; and, in a more restricted sense, it includes the sufferings which the Christians underwent on account of their religion.

Historians usually reckon ten general persecutions; the first of which took place under the Emperor Nero, thirty-one years after our Lord’s ascension, when that emperor having set fire to the city of Rome, threw the odium of this execrable act on the Christians, who were consequently wrapped up in the skins of wild beasts, and worried and devoured by dogs, whilst some were crucified, and others burned alive. The second took place under Domitian, in the year ninety-five. In this persecution St John the apostle was sent to the Isle of Patmos, being condemned to work in the mines. The third began in the third year of Trajan, in the year 100 of our era, and was carried on with great violence for several years. The fourth took place under Antoninus the philosopher, when the Christians were banished from their houses, forbidden to show their heads, reproached, beaten, hurried from place to place, plundered, imprisoned, and stoned. The fifth began in the year of our Lord 197, under the Emperór Severus. The sixth began with the reign of the Emperor Maximinus in 235.

The seventh, which was the most dreadful persecution that had ever been known in the church, commenced in the year 250, in the reign of the Emperor Decius, when the Christians were in all places driven from their habitations, stripped of their estates, tormented with the rack, and subjected to every species of suffering. The eighth began in the year 257, in the fourth year of the reign of the Emperor Valerian. The ninth took place under the Emperor Aurelian, in the year 2S4?; but this proved very inconsiderable. The tenth began in the nineteenth year of Dioclesian, and in the 303d year of our era. In this dreadful persecution, which lasted ten years, houses filled with Christians were set on fire, and numbers of them were tied together with ropes and thrown into the sea.

But these reiterated and cruel efforts to put down the Christian religion, or at least to check its advancement, proved utterly abortive; perhaps, humanly speaking, they served, in no inconsiderable degree, to accelerate its progress towards the complete triumph which it at length obtained in the reign of Constantine. It has often been remarked, that the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church, and, in one sense, this is true. Of all the aggressions on freedom of thought and belief committed under the influence of bigotry, fanaticism, or, worst of all. a hardhearted and unfeeling policy, persecution is the most bootless, short-sighted, and foolish. In every case, it is certain to defeat its own object. It may give even to error a temporary eclat of popularity which it could never otherwise obtain; whilst truth, not only unskathed, but purified, by the fire, issues from the furnace, like gold seven times refined, and presents herself to the eyes of mankind in renovated beauty and glory. Infidel philosophers have told us, that polytheism was naturally tolerant. But the history of the Christian church says No, and proves that Paganism, like every other system of established error, was prone to employ force against evidence, and to persecute where it despaired of convincing.