Page:Outlines of European History.djvu/358

 300 Outlines of E^iropean History Spread of Christianity Paul and the foundation of the earliest churches Rome persecutes the early Christians Among all these faiths of the East that were displacing the old religion of Rome, the common people were more and more inclining toward one of which we have not yet spoken. It too came out of the East. Its teachers told how their Master, Jesus, was born in Palestine, the land of the Jews, in the days of Augustus, and how he had caught a vision of human brother- hood and of divine fatherhood, surpassing that which the Hebrew prophets had once discerned (p. io6). This faith he preached for a few years — till he incurred the hatred of his countrymen and they put him to death. A Jewish tent-maker named Paul, a man gifted with pas- fsionate eloquence and unquenchable love for his Master, passed far and wide through the cities of Asia Minor and Greece, and leven to Rome, proclaiming his Master's teaching. He left be- hind him a line of devoted communities stretching from Palestine to Rome. A group of letters which he wrote to his followers were circulating widely among them and were read with eager- ness. They are preserved to us in the New Testament. The slave and the freedman, the artizan and craftsman, the humble and the despised in the huge barracks which sheltered the poor in Rome, listened to this new " mystery " from the East, as they thought it to be, and, as time passed, multitudes accepted it and found joy in the hopes which it awakened. Thus was Christianity launched upon the great tide of Roman life. The officers of government often found these early con- verts not only refusing to acknowledge the divinity of the Em- peror and to sacrifice to him, but also openly prophesying the downfall of the Roman State. They were therefore more than once called upon to endure cruel persecution. Their religion seemed incompatible with good citizenship, since it forbade them to show the usual respect for the government. Nevertheless their numbers steadily grew.