They shall put you out of the synagogues: yea, the time cometh, that whosoever killeth you will think that he doeth God service.
Ver. 2. Whosoerer killeth you, &c.] Maximinian, the persecutor, thought that the blood of Christians would be a well pleasing sacrifice to his gods: Christianorum sanguinem Diis gratissimam esse victimam. (Tertul.) Budaeus thinks that the apostle, 1 Corinthians 4:13, alludes to those heathenish expiations, wherein certain condemned persons were brought forth yearly with garlands upon their heads, and offered up as sacrifices to their gods, in time of any contagious infection especially; and these they termed καθαρματα and περιψηματα. At Colon certain divines preached, that the death of certain heretics (as they called them) should pacify the wrath of God which then plagued Germany grievously with a strange kind of sweating sickness. (Budaeus in Pandect.) In the sixth Council of Toledo, it was enacted that the king of Spain should suffer none to live in his dominions that professed not the Roman Catholic religion. King Philip, accordingly, having hardly escaped shipwreck, as he returned from the Low Countries, said he was delivered by the singular providence of God to root out Lutheranism, which he presently began to do, professing that he had rather have no subjects than such. Another Catholic king said that if he thought his shirt were infected with that heresy, he would tear it from his own back, and rather go woolward; nay, if any member of his body had caught the contagion, he would cut it off, that it might creep no further. O sancta simplicitas! Oh holy candour, said John Huss, when at the stake he observed a plain country fellow busier than the rest in fetching fagots.