66 The Faith of Our Fathers contains three important declarations: First — The presence of Christ with His Church — "Behold, I am with you." Second — His constant presence, without an interval of one day's absence — "I am with you all days." Third — His perpetual presence to the end of the world, and consequently the perpetual duration of the Church — "Even to the consummation of the world." Hence it follows that the true Church must have existed from the beginning; it must have had not one day's interval of suspended animation, or separation from Christ, and must live to the end of time. None of the Christian Communions outside the Catholic Church can have any reasonable claim to Perpetuity, since, as we have seen in the preceding chapter, they are all104 of recent origin. The indestructibility of the Catholic Church is truly marvellous and well calculated to excite the admiration of every reflecting mind, when we consider the number and variety, and the formidable power of the enemies with whom she had to contend from her very birth to the present time; this fact alone stamps divinity on her brow. The Church has been constantly engaged in a double warfare, one foreign, the other domestic — in foreign war against Paganism and infidelity; in civil strife against heresy and schism fomented [052] by her own rebellious children. From the day of Pentecost till the victory of Constantine the Great over Maxentius, embracing a period of about two hundred and eighty years, the Church underwent a series of ten persecutions unparalleled for atrocity in the annals of history. Every torture that malice could invent was resorted to, that every vestige of Christianity might be eradicated. "Christianos ad leones, " the Christians to the lions, was the popular war-cry. They were clothed in the skins of wild beasts, and thus exposed 104 Except some Oriental sects dating back to the fifth and ninth centuries.