How Atrociously the Sincere Christians were Treated During This Persecution

Everywhere, in all the cities, writes P. J. Twisck, the imperial edicts and decrees against the Christians were posted up. Because of this the magistrates and officers proceeded very cruelly against them, persecuting them even to death, with great atrocity and fury. For no mode of torture, punishment, or death, however great, severe, and merciless, could be devised, produced, or planned by these wicked men, these tyrants and instruments of the devil, but the Christians, as accursed, as enemies of the Kingdom, and as the cause of all misfortune, were thought to deserve a thousand times more. To be publicly mocked, imprisoned for life, exiled, scourged, stoned, strangled, hanged, beheaded, and burned was thought far too little.

At this time they began to press the poor people with red-hot plates until they were dead; to tear the flesh from their bones with red-hot tongs; to set them on iron stools over a slow fire; to fry them in iron frying pans; to roast them on gridirons over a slow fire; to throw them, wrapped in close netting, before wild bulls, to serve as sport for them, and to be tossed into the air on their horns.

All of this was accompanied by still another cruelty. The bodies of the slain were thrown before the dogs, and guards were placed beside them, to keep the Christians from carrying these bodies away and burying them. In short, the misery was so great that at Lyons alone Bishop Irenaeus, with nineteen thousand of his sheep, was cruelly butchered. So far P. J. Twisck, in his Chronicle, second book, for the year 162, page 43, column 2, from Chron. Mich. Sac., folio 103; Chron. Sebast. Fra.; also Tyd. Thresor, P. Merula. [n151-2]