We press on, then, on one step, and challenge on this point alone: whether martyrdoms have been commanded by God, so that you may believe them commanded with reason, once you know they have been commanded, since God has commanded nothing without reason. For the death of His devout ones is honored in His sight, as David sings: not, I think, this common death, which is everyone's debt (and this death is even ignominious, from the record of transgression and the deserving of condemnation), but the death that is undergone in him, in witness to religion and in the battle of confession for righteousness and the sacrament. As Isaiah says: “See how the righteous man perishes, and no one takes it to heart; and righteous men are taken away, and no one notices; for the righteous man perishes before the face of unrighteousness, and his burial will be in honor.” Here too you have both the foretelling and the rewarding of martyrdoms. For from the beginning righteousness suffers violence. As soon as God began to be worshiped, religion was allotted envy. He who had pleased God is killed, and by his brother at that. So that ungodliness might more readily pursue another's blood, it began with its own; and it pursued, in short, the blood not only of the righteous but of the prophets too. David is hounded, Elijah put to flight, Jeremiah stoned, Isaiah sawn apart, Zechariah slaughtered between the altar and the temple, leaving on the stones the lasting stains of his blood. He who was the very close of the law and the prophets, called not a prophet but an angel, is beheaded in a shameful murder as the fee for a dancing girl. And surely those who were led by the Spirit of God were directed by him into martyrdoms, suffering even what they had foretold. So also the three brothers, when the dedication of the king's image was pressing the crowd to its duty, did not fail to know what faith, which alone in them had not been taken captive, required: namely, to die rather than commit idolatry. For they remembered Jeremiah too, writing to those on whom that captivity was impending: “And now you will see gods of the Babylonians, of gold and silver and wood, carried on (men's) shoulders, inspiring fear among the nations.⁠a Beware, then, that you too do not become like the foreigners and be seized with fear when you see the crowds worshiping behind them and before them, but say in your heart: ‘You, Lord, we must worship.'” So, with a confidence conceived from God, they said (and with what vigor of mind they shook off those conditional threats of the king!): “We have no need to answer this command of yours. For our God, whom we worship, is able to rescue us from the furnace of fire and from your hands; and then it will be made plain to you that we will neither serve your idol nor worship your golden image which you have set up.” martyrdom made perfect even without suffering! They suffered enough, they were burned enough, whom God protected for this reason, that they might not seem to have lied about His power. For Daniel too, a suppliant of no one but God and for that reason denounced and demanded by the Chaldeans, the ferocity of the lions, shut up and accustomed to its work, would surely have devoured at once, if Darius's worthy presumption about God had been meant to be disappointed. For the rest, every preacher and worshipper of God who, challenged to idolatry, refused compliance had to suffer, in accordance also with that principle by which the truth had to be commended both to those then present and to posterity thereafter: the suffering of its very defenders would vouch for its credibility, since no one would have been willing to be killed in vain unless he possessed the truth. Such precepts and examples from the beginning show that faith owes martyrdom.