52s PROSPECTS OF THE WESTERN CIVILIZATION
Titus, and of the Suliots who blew themselves up or threw themselves
and their children over a precipice in A.D. 1803 rather than surrender to
"Ail Tepelenli.1 Nor can we omit from this role of honour those execrable
Assyrians who died like heroes at Harran in 610-609 B.C., two years after
the destruction of the wasps' nest at Nineveh.

It is, however, significant that in Jerusalem in A.D. 70 a majority of the
besieged would have countenanced overtures for forestalling extermina-
tion by surrender if they had not been terrorized by a minority of
fanatics into participating in these Zealots' suicidal heroism—under pain,
as the penalty for 'peace talk', of being stabbed to death by the dagger of a
Jewish sicarius before any Roman legionary's sword could come within
striking distance of them; and, though Josephus, who is the source of
our information, is a hostile witness to the conduct of the Jewish Zealots,
there is no reason to suspect him of having falsified the truth on this
point.

It is also significant that the Christian martyrs, who gave their lives
rather than commit what would have been, in their eyes, an act of dis-
loyalty to God, died in the confident belief that their blood was the
Church's seed;2 that a Church which Christ Himself had founded would
endure, not only till Christ's ministers on Earth had had time to go into
all the World and preach the Gospel to every creature,3 but to the end of
Time; and that, though Heaven and Earth would pass away, Christ's
words would not pass away4—as they believed that Christ Himself had
declared after His resurrection and had then guaranteed by another posi-
tive act when He had ascended into Heaven, where He sitteth at the
right hand of God the Father Almighty in saecula saeculorum. Though
the citizens of this or that earthly commonwealth might have had the
spirit, on occasion, to see their motherland perish with them, or even
before them, rather than stoop to bow their necks to a foreign yoke, only
the adherents of a religion that made no account of This World by com-
parison with an Other World could logically court, for the glory of God,
a death that would be, not only their own death, but simultaneously the
death of all life on the face of a planet that was their mundane home. It is
all the more significant that the Early Christian martyrs, who did hold
this transcendental belief, should have been inspired, not solely by a
confidence that they were sacrificing their lives for the glory of God in a
Heavenly Kingdom utterly beyond the reach of the most potent opera-
tions of a terrestrial human Technology, but also in part by a confidence
that, by making this supreme personal sacrifice, they were promoting
the propagation of Christ's Church Militant here on Earth—as Leonidas
and his three hundred companions at Thermopylae had been confident
that, by sacrificing their lives, they were furthering the mundane inter-
ests of the Commonwealth of Lacedaemon.

of mass sett-Immolation having been when they had refused to surrender to Alexander
the Great.

* See Finlay, G.: A History of Greece, B.C. 146 to A.D. 1864, vol. vi (Oxford 1877,
Clarendon Press), p. 51.

* See the passages from the works of Justin and TertuUian that have been quoted in
V, vi. 202, nn. 2 and 3.

3 Mark xvi. 15. * Matt. xxiv. 35; Mark xiv. 31; Luke xxi. 33.