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 IV

REASONS OF THE PERSECUTING POLICY OF THE ANTONINES

Among the subjects of the Empire only one group stood persistently aloof from the crowds of worshippers who again thronged these time-honoured shrines; this group refused to share in the ancient Roman cult which the Antonines had once more made the vogue in Rome and in her provinces, a cult to which these great pagan Emperors ever referred the glories of the past, and on which they grounded their hopes of a yet more splendid future for Rome.

The solitary group was indeed a strange one. To a Roman like Antoninus Pius it appeared to be composed of a sect, comparatively speaking, of yesterday; for when his predecessor Augustus reigned and Vergil wrote, it had no existence. It was a sect professing, as it seemed to the Emperor, a new religion—a religion which claimed for the One it worshipped a solitary supremacy—a religion which regarded the awful gods of Rome as shadows, as mere phantoms of the imagination. Well might sovereigns like the Antonines shudder at a teaching which would appear to a true patriot Roman, whose heart was all aflame with national pride, to involve the most daring impiety, the most shocking blasphemy; which would threaten a tremendous risk for the future of her people, if this fatal teaching should spread.

And this strange sect of yesterday, the Emperors would hear from their officials, was multiplying to an enormous extent, not only in Rome but in all the provinces.

They would receive reports from all lands how the new community called Christian was daily adding fresh converts to its extraordinary and dangerous belief,—converts drawn from the ranks of the humblest traders, from slaves and freedmen—converts drawn, too, from the noblest families of the Empire.