Page:Readings in European History Vol 1.djvu/58

 22 Readings in European History hostile to the government, and were consequently treated with the utmost harshness. Even the wisest and best emperors, such as Trajan and Marcus Aurelius, ordered that any one should be condemned to death who was convicted of bearing the name of Christian. 1 Christians were first put upon a legal footing with adherents of the various pagan religions by Emperor Galerius in the year 31 i. 2 His edict reads as follows: Amongst our other measures for the advantage of the Empire, we have hitherto endeavored to bring all things into conformity with the ancient laws and public order of the Romans. We have been especially anxious that even the Christians, who have abandoned the religion of their ances- tors, should return to reason. For they have fallen, we know not how, into such perversity and folly that, instead of adhering to those ancient institutions which possibly their own forefathers established, they have arbitrarily made laws of their own and collected together various peoples from various quarters. After the publication, on our part, of an order command- ing the Christians to return to the observance of the ancient customs, many of them, it is true, submitted in view of the danger, while many others suffered death. Nevertheless, since many of them have continued to persist in their opin- ions and we see that in the present situation they neither 1 Christians were not, however, to be sought out by the government officials and could only be tried when accusation was brought against them by some definite person. A series of extracts illustrating the extent and character of the early persecutions of the Christians is to be found in Translations and Reprints, Vol. IV, No. i. 2 A German scholar, Seeck, has pretty conclusively shown that the so-called Edict of Milan, by which Constantine was long supposed to have rescued the Christians from persecution, was not really an edict at all, but a letter addressed by Constantine's colleague, Licinius, to some government official in the East, commanding him to see that the edict of Galerius was carried out in a thorough manner. See Zeit- schrift fur Kirchengeschichte, Vol. XII, pp. 381 sqq.