Martyrdom

Tom is obsessed with martyrdom.

What do you think are the problems that underlie your obsession with martyrdom?

It was bound, Clarissa used to think, to end in some awful tragedy; her death; her martyrdom; instead of which she had married, quite unexpectedly, a bald man with a large buttonhole who owned, it was said, cotton mills at Manchester.

Miroslav knows exactly the kind of martyrdom Rima suffered at the hands of the legionnaires.

The like clamour, and outcry, the Rabble of the unbelieving Jews and Gentiles made againſt Polycarp Biſhop of Smyrna, at the time of his Martyrdom. crying out againſt him to the Governour, that he ſhould caſt him to the Lyons, and when he anſwered them he could not, becauſe the Spectacular ſports were concluded, then they cry’d out, Burn him, burn him, juſt as the Jews cryed out againſt Chriſt to Pilate, Crucify him, crucify him.

“Regard not that, my brother,” answered Magdalen Græme; “the first successors of Saint Peter himself, were elected not in sunshine but in tempests—not in the halls of the Vatican, but in the subterranean vaults and dungeons of Heathen Rome—they were not gratulated with shouts and salvos of cannon-shot and of musquetry, and the display of artificial fire—no, my brother—but by the hoarse summons of Lictors and Prætors, who came to drag the Fathers of the Church to martyrdom.[…]”

The ceiling had been painted with the martyrdom of some saint. Who shall place a bound to human folly, when both the inflicter and the endurer of torture have deemed that pain is acceptable in the sight of God?

The Communists wanted to go on and on, suffering a comfortable martyrdom, meeting with endless defeats and afterwards putting the blame on other people.