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All these things were fulfilled in us, when we saw with our own eyes
the houses of prayer thrown down to the very foundations, and the
Divine and Sacred Scriptures committed to the flames in the midst of
the market-places, and the shepherds of the churches basely hidden
here and there, and some of them captured ignominiously, and mocked by
their enemies. When also, according to another prophetic word,
"Contempt was poured out upon rulers, and he caused them to wander in
an untrodden and pathless way."
But it is not our place to describe the sad misfortunes which finally
came upon them, as we do not think it proper, moreover, to record
their divisions and unnatural conduct to each other before the
persecution. Wherefore we have decided to relate nothing concerning
them except the things in which we can vindicate the Divine judgment.
Hence we shall not mention those who were shaken by the persecution,
nor those who in everything pertaining to salvation were shipwrecked,
and by their own will were sunk in the depths of the flood. But we
shall introduce into this history in general only those events which may
be use-fill first to ourselves and afterwards to posterity. Let us
therefore proceed to describe briefly the sacred conflicts of the
witnesses of the Divine Word.
It was in the nineteenth year of the reign of Diocletian, in the
month Dystrus, called March by the Romans, when the feast of the
Saviour's passion was near at hand, that royal edicts were published
everywhere, commanding that the churches be leveled to the ground and
the Scriptures be destroyed by fire, and ordering that those who held
places of honor be degraded, and that the household servants, if they
persisted in the profession of Christianity, be deprived of freedom.
Such was the first edict against us. But not long after, other
decrees were issued, commanding that all the rulers of the churches in
every place be first thrown into prison, and afterwards by every
artifice be compelled to sacrifices.
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