Armatura Dei, or, A preparation for suffering in an evil day showing how Christians…Armatura Dei, or, A preparation for suffering in an evil day shewing how Christians…

2. Pious Sufferers do propagate and multiply the Church. When Abel, the first Martyr was slain, there was a Seth raised up in his room. When righteous persons are slain by Persecutors, more of them spiring up in the Church. The more the Children of Israel were afflicted in Egypt, the more they multiplied and grew, Exod. 1.11. As the ground, that is most harrowed, is most fruitful; so God's People, the more they were straitened under the burdens of men, the more they were enlarged ⟨p. 137⟩by the blessing of God. The Roman Emperors did design utterly to extirpate Christianity: Diocletian (the greatest Persecutor of all, who filled the World with the blood of Martyrs) thought he had effected it; this Inscription was upon his Coin. Nomine Christianorum deleto, qui rem publicam everterunt: The name of Christians, who overthrew the Commonwealth, is extinct: But they were all in a mistake; in the midst of the Ten bloody Persecutions, there was still a new Generation of Christians springing up out of the blood of the Martyrs. Tertullian tells the vexing torturing Persecutors,¹ Plures efficimur, quoties metimur; semen est sanguis Christianorum: The more we are mowed and cut down, the more we grow and multiply; the blood of Christians is the Seed of the Church. St. Austin saith of the persecuted Christians, Coedebantur, ²torquebantur, urebantur, laniabantur, trucidabantur, & multiplicabantur: They were beaten, tortured, burned, torn, killed, and yet they were multiplied. Julian the Apostate learned this from persecution under Diocletian, and upon that account he abstained for a time from exercising Torments and bloody Cruelties upon Christians,³ because he saw that the Christians by patient Suffering were multiplied and became ⟨p. 138⟩more glorious in the eyes of the People. Antichrist hath shed a great deal of precious blood, and the witnesses of the pure Religion have been slain under him, yet hath the Evangelical Truth remained, and the Witnesses, which were Slain, have from time to time revived and stood up in illustrious Successors, who have held forth the same Truth, and spoke in the same Spirit and Power, as those before them had done. When after the Parisian Massacre there happened to be a great serenity in Heaven,