own name,-to throw off the odium of so scandalous and dangerous a suspicion, accused the Christians of the crime and the Lord's warning words being fulfilled, "ye shall be hated of all men for my name's sake," the people readily listened to the ungrounded accusation, and the unoffending and unresisting Christians were doomed to every species of torment that the malice of man or of Satan could devise. A Roman historian named Tacitus gives an account of the Christians' sufferings, but it is the account, be it remembered, of a prejudiced and bigotted Pagan: but while Tacitus calls them a people odious for scandalous vices,' and 'haters of the human race,' he owns the sufferers were objects of pity, being considered as thus persecuted to gratify the savage cruelty of one man.

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How ignorantly, or how maliciously people can sometimes speak of the noblest characters! Tacitus calls them a people odious for scandalous vices,' whom Paul calls "beloved of God, called to be saints."

The account this writer gives of the sufferings of these worthy servants of the Lord is heartrending. 'Sport,' he says, was made of them; they were covered with the skins of wild beasts, and torn to pieces by dogs: they were fastened on crosses; they were thrown into the Tiber sewed up in sacks; they were wrapped round with combustible materials and set in Nero's gardens to be burnt during the night as lamps.' But enough of this, I need tell you no more to prove the truth of our

Lord's words, "Behold I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves."

Then it was that to the suffering Christians of Rome St. Paul's exhortation was useful; and then might they, who for Christ's sake " were killed all the day long, and counted as sheep for the slaughter," take up the triumphant question of the great Apostle, and ask, "who shall separate us from the love of Christ? shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? Nay, might the martyrs exclaim," in all these things we are more than conquerors, through him that loved us."

The horrid Nero met the death he merited, and well might envy those who, in the wantonness of power and cruelty, he had so barbarously murdered. No help was found for him in the day of his calamity; and when, deserted by those who had been his slaves, he fled in trembling horror from his golden palace, he might recollect, with altered feelings, the martyrs he had sent to death with the song of triumph in their mouths.

Yet Nero had known the instructions of the famous Seneca, and, a still higher advantage, had heard the Gospel preached by Paul: but the lessons of human wisdom cannot cure the evil of man's heart, nor can the eloquence of the preacher rouse the sinner from his lethargy, unless the Spirit of God bring home his words with power to the heart.

Nero possessed a great advantage in having a

wise, though a Pagan instructor. His story is a warning to such as possess, and do not rightly prize, the far higher advantage of a Christian instructor. Perhaps his treatment of his preceptor might have appeared to him in its true colours, when he felt the bitter consequences of his foolish, mad, and wicked conduct.

You have heard and read of the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans, and therefore I will not say much about it: the war was commenced by Nero, whose general Vespasian in the space of two years subdued all Judea. Jerusalem, however, obstinately held out, and thus deepened her misery. The remark of Vespasian, when advised to hasten the attack, shows the wretched and distracted state of that devoted city; It is far better,' said he, to let the Jews destroy one another.'

These intestine contentions went on even when the Jewish people were allowed a short respite, in consequence of the death of Nero and the troubles in which the Roman empire was involved by the fierce disputes and contentions for the throne, which was successively grasped by Galba, Otho, and Vitellius.

When Vitellius had shared the fate of the other contenders for empire, and, having gained the throne, died in his turn by the hand of violence, Vespasian was saluted emperor by the army in Judea, and went to Rome, leaving his son Titus to carry on the siege of Jerusalem. In a few months

Titus took the devoted city; and thus, amid all the horrors that the imagination can conceive, fell Jerusalem, and her children within her.

Neither Vespasian nor Titus persecuted the Christians the miseries inflicted on the Jewish people might be the means of procuring the church of Christ a little rest from suffering. But this rest only lasted during the reigns of Vespasian and Titus Domitian, who succeeded them, was like another Nero. Among other violent acts, it is said that he cast the apostle John into a caldron of boiling oil, in which God preserved him, as he did of old his three servants in the fiery furnace. Many doubt this, and think it an improbable tale ; but we know that in those days God wrought many miracles for the deliverance of his people, and the conversion of those who were his enemies. Domitian was not, however, converted by it, nor even inclined to spare John on account of it; he banished him into the solitary isle of Patmos, as he himself says, "for the word of God and for the testimony of Jesus." Rev. i. 2. Domitian, like his predecessors in crime, met with a bloody death: he was killed in his palace by a slave whose mistress he had banished, and was succeeded by Nerva, an old and mildly-disposed man, who suffered the Christians to remain in peace. Nerva only reigned two years, and in these two years two acts are all that are worth mentioning: these are of a different nature, the one being highly commended by historians, the other, one that few are concerned to speak

of. I mean his appointing Trajan, a general in his army, for his colleague and successor, and recalling the apostle John from banishment. Of Trajan I must speak in my next story of John I have not much to say; he returned to his station at Ephesus, and, at the age of nearly a hundred years, was taken from a sinful world, to live with the Saviour whom he so much loved.