Page:Lucian (IA lucianlucas00collrich).pdf/177



notices of Christianity to be found in heathen authors who were either contemporary with its great Founder, or who wrote during the early ages of the Christian Church, are so few, that even the slightest has an interest beyond what would otherwise be its historical importance. The rarity of such notices, and their general brevity and indistinctness, is apt to surprise us, until we recollect that Christianity did not for some time make that impression upon the heathen world which from our own point of view we might naturally expect. The Christians were long regarded as merely a sect within a sect, and that an insignificant and despised one: even historians like Tacitus and Suetonius saw in the "Christus" whom they both mention little more than a ringleader of turbulent Jews. Superstitions of all kinds and from all quarters were crowding in, as we may see even from Lucian's own pages, upon the ground which the priesthood of pagan Rome were striving to hold by making the national religion so "catholic" as to include the gods of as many other creeds as they could. Men believed, as Wieland says,