Page:The early Christians in Rome (1911).djvu/117

 of the Eternal of Hosts—they would quietly wait His good pleasure, and by a rigid observance in all its minutest details of the divine law, which they made the sole object of their study and meditation, would merit once more His favour; they hoped and expected at some distant day again to rejoice in the light of His countenance,—a light, alas! long since veiled owing to their past disobedience; to the Christian and his teaching in the meantime they vowed an implacable hatred.

It then began (after 134-5), slowly at first, to dawn upon the statesmen of Rome that the Christian was no mere Jewish dissenter, but a member of a new and perfectly distinct community, a sect intensely in earnest, successful in making proselytes, possessing, too, a secret power which the Roman statesman marvelled at but was incapable of understanding,—a secret power which made the Christian absolutely fearless of death and utterly regardless of any punishment human ingenuity could devise; a sect, too, which, quite independent of the Jews, daily was multiplying, and was rapidly numbering in its ranks men and women of every calling, drawn, too, from every province indifferently in the wide Roman empire,—becoming, indeed, an Empire within an Empire.

But the subjects of this inner Empire, while loyal to the State, obedient, and peaceful, dwelt as it were as a nation apart, professing an allegiance to an invisible Power unknown to the ancient traditions of Rome, and irreconcilably hostile to the ancient religion on which the true Roman loved to believe the grandeur of the Empire was based.

The consciousness of all this may be said to have really dawned upon Roman statesmen only after the great change which passed over Judaism at the close of the awful war of Hadrian,—a change which showed for the first time the broad gulf which yawned between the Jewish people and the new Christian community.

The last two years of Hadrian's reign, which immediately followed the close of the great Jewish war, were marked by the adoption of a new and severer policy by the State in regard to Christians. We hear of cases of extreme harshness in the case of the treatment of Christians by the State. Many stories of martyrdom date from this period. This stern policy was