said Gaius, "that you are a prostitute. Sacrifice, therefore, as you are a stranger to the God of the Christians, and cannot be accepted by Him." Afra replied, "My Lord Jesus Christ said that He came down from heaven to save sinners. His gospels testify that an abandoned woman washed His feet with her tears and obtained pardon, and that He never rejected such women, nor the publicans, but suffered them to eat with Him." Gaius said,

follow

you

still

"Sacrifice, that lovers may your and enrich you." Afra answered, "I will have no more of that execrable gain. I have thrown away, as so much filth, what I had by me of it. My brethren, the poor, would not have it, until I besought them with tears to take it, that they might pray for my sins." Gaius retorted, "Christ will not have you. It is in vain for you to acknowledge Him for your God. A prostitute can never be called a Christian." Afra replied, "It is true I am unworthy to bear the name of a Christian; but the mercy of God, who judges not after our merit, but His own goodness, has admitted me to be one." "And how know you that?" said Gaius. Afra answered, "I know that God has not rejected me from before His face, because He has permitted me to come to the glorious confession of His holy name, by which I hope to receive the pardon of all my sins." Gaius said, "These are tales; sacrifice to the gods, and they will save you." She replied, "My Saviour is Christ, who, hanging on the Cross,

promised paradise to the penitent thief." "Sacrifice," said the judge; "or I will have you stripped and flogged in the presence of your lovers." "I am only ashamed," said Afra, "at the remembrance of my sins." The judge cried, "Sacrifice to the gods! I am ashamed to have disputed with you so long. If you will not, you shall die." Afra said, "That is my desire, if only I am not unworthy to find rest by this confession." The judge answered, "Sacrifice, or I will order you to be tormented, and afterwards to be burnt alive." Afra said, "Let the body which hath sinned undergo torments; but I will not taint my soul by sacrificing to demons." Then the judge gave sentence, "We condemn Afra, a prostitute, who declares herself a Christian, to be burnt alive, because she has refused to offer sacrifice to the gods." Upon this the executioners seized her, and carried her into an island on the river Lech, upon which Augsburg stands. There they stripped her, and tied her to a stake. She lifted her eyes to heaven, and prayed with tears, saying, "O Lord Jesus Christ, Almighty God, who camest to call not the just, but sinners to repentance, and hast promised in Thy mercy that at whatsoever hour the sinner is converted, Thou wilt not remember his sins; accept in this hour the penance of my sufferings, and by this temporal fire which consumes my body, deliver me from the eternal fire which torments both soul and body." While the executioners were

heaping a pile of vine-branches about her, and setting fire to them, she was heard to say, “I return Thee thanks, O Lord Jesus Christ, for the honour Thou hast done me in receiving me a holocaust for Thy name's sake; Thou who hast vouchsafed to offer Thyself upon the altar of the Cross a sacrifice for the sins of the whole world, the Just for the unjust and for sinners. I offer myself a victim to Thee, O my God, who livest and reignest with the Father and the Holy Ghost, world without end." Having spoken these words, she expired, suffocated by the smoke.

And it was in the blood of thousands of virgins and penitents that the heathen world, if it was not baptised and new created unto the virtue of purity, learned at least to recognise what it could not imitate; and if the world has forgotten its benefactors, the Church forgets them not, presenting daily before the Divine remembrance the names of seven, as it were the first-fruits and standard-bearers of that bright band, Felicitas, Perpetua, Agatha, Lucy, Agnes, Cæcilia, and Anastasia, the first named of whom was a slave.*

In what consisted the essence of heathenism? in what the force and hold which it exerted over men and women living in a stage of the most ad

*They are named in the Canon of the Mass: "Nobis quoque peccatoribus, famulis tuis, de multitudine miserationum tuarum sperantibus, partem aliquam et societatem donare digneris cum tuis sanctis apostolis et martyribus: cum Joanne, Stephano, Matthia, Barnaba, Ignatio, Alexandro, Petro, Felicitate, Perpetua, Agatha, Lucia, Agnete, Cæcilia, Anastasia, et omnibus sanctis tuis."

vanced civilisation, such as were the Romans of the first three centuries? At first sight, it would seem that the worship of more gods than one was an absurdity too great for man's reason to accept; and again, that the worship of such gods as those of Rome, Greece, Egypt, Syria, and Western Asia, would be shocking to man's natural sense of right. But polytheism, idolatry, and the immoral worship of immoral gods, were but symptoms and effects of the disease, manifestations of a universal permanent evil which lay much deeper. If we conceive of man as an animal endued with reason, having a body and no less a mind with certain needs to be satisfied; a body which asks for perpetual support, replenishment, warmth, and clothing; a mind which has its own needs, affections, and craving for enjoyment; if we add that his time and place of life upon the earth make up the proper sphere in which

he is to seek the satisfaction of all these needs, the attainment of all these enjoyments, which are the objects respectively of his bodily and mental desires; if we so conceive, and stop here in our conception of man, the result will be this: Man as an animal will give his body every indulgence in food and other animal pleasures which he can procure; and as an animal endued with mind will seek no less to satisfy the desires of the mind, such as consist in the cultivation of the affections, in acquiring knowledge, distinction among his fellow-men, power over them, whereby he may make them instruments

of his pleasures. Perhaps such a state of things is most completely expressed in few words by the worship of wealth, because wealth commands naturally the possession of a large portion of such goods as are here contemplated. Money represents the value put by man upon such goods as are purchaseable. Those, therefore, who place their end in the possession of such goods will worship money; and the more refined society has become, the more the bodily and mental needs and pleasures of man are multiplied, the more he is accustomed to satisfy mind and body therein, the more entire will that worship of wealth become. In such a state of things heathenism consists. Pericles and Alcibiades, as well as the Athenian demos; Augustus and Trajan, as well as the Roman plebs; Horace and Virgil, as well as the Mantuan or Calabrian peasant, were heathens in this sense. The worship of such deities as Jupiter, Apollo, Venus, and Cybele, and the deeds attributed to them, were invented in order to support and justify such heathenism. As long as it existed and flourished, so would they. Their worship rested upon it, not it upon them. When the Christians were brought before the Roman tribunals, and commanded to worship "the immortal gods," they replied by saying, that they would worship none but the one God, the Creator and Rewarder of men.

folly, and sacrifice," was the reply.

"Cease your And the con

duct of the Christian was folly to the heathen, be