Still afraid to share your faith? These people weren’t.

The tyrants and organs of Satan were not contented with death only, to bereave the life from the body. The kinds of death were diverse, and no less horrible than diverse. Whatsoever the cruelness of man’s invention could devise for the punishment of man’s body, was practiced against the Christians – stripes and scourgings, drawings, tearings, stonings, plates of iron laid unto them burning hot, deep dungeons, racks, strangling in prisons, the teeth of wild beasts, gridirons, gibbets and gallows, tossing upon the horns of bulls. Moreover, when they were thus killed, their bodies were laid in heaps, and dogs there left to keep them, that no man might come to bury them, neither would any prayer obtain them to be interred.

And yet, notwithstanding all these continual persecutions and horrible punishments, the Church daily increased deeply rooted in the doctrine of the apostles and of men apostolical, and watered plenteously with the blood of saints.

—From the original “Foxe’s Book of Martyrs”, By John Foxe