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MARTYRS quotes
God discovers the martyr and confessor without the trial of flames and tortures, and will thereafter entitle many to the reward of actions which they never had the opportunity of performing.
Fools love the martyrdom of fame.
Christianity has made martyrdom sublime, and sorrow triumphant.
O, how much those men are to be valued who, in the spirit with which the widow gave up her two mites, have given up themselves! How their names sparkle! How rich their very ashes are! How they will count up in Heaven!
He that dies a martyr proves that he was not a knave, but by no means that he was not a fool; since the most absurd doctrines are not without such evidence as martyrdom can produce. A martyr, therefore, by the mere act of suffering, can prove nothing but his own faith.
Two things are necessary to a modern martyr,—some to pity, and some to persecute, some to regret, and some to roast him. If martyrdom is now on the decline, it is not because martyrs are less zealous, but because martyr-mongers are more wise.
Their blood is shed in confirmation of the noblest claim—the claim to feed upon immortal truth, to walk with God, and be divinely free.
They lived unknown, till persecution dragged them into fame, and chased them up to heaven. Their ashes flew no marble tells us whither. With their names no bard embalms and sanctifies his song: and history, so warm on meaner things, is cold on this.
For some not to be martyred is a martyrdom.
The way of the world is, to praise dead saints, and persecute living ones.
The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.
Who falls for the love of God, shall rise a star.
It is admirable to die the victim of one's faith; it is sad to die the dupe of one's ambition.
It is more difficult, and calls for higher energies of soul, to live a martyr than to die one.
When we read, we fancy we could be martyrs; when we come to act, we cannot bear a provoking word.
The martyrs to vice far exceed the martyrs to virtue, both in endurance and in number. So blinded are we by our passions, that we suffer more to be damned than to be saved.
It is the cause and not merely the death that makes the martyr.
Those who completely sacrifice themselves are praised and admired; that is the sort of character men like to find in others.
Even in this world they will have their judgment day; and their names, which went down in the dust like a gallant banner trodden in the mire, shall rise again all glorious in the sight of nations.
No language can fitly express the meanness, the baseness, the brutality, with which the world has ever treated its victims of one age and boasts of them in the next. Dante is worshiped at that grave to which he was hurried by persecution. Milton, in his own day, was "Mr. Milton, the blind adder, that spit his venom on the king's person"; and soon after, "the mighty orb of song." These absurd transitions from hatred to apotheosis, this recognition just at the moment when it becomes a mockery, saddens all intellectual history.
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