Page:The early Christians in Rome (1911).djvu/130

 They would hear, too, from their responsible officials that the new sect, from its great and ever-increasing numbers, its striking unity of belief, its perfect organization, had already become a power in the State,—a real power with which the imperial government sooner or later would have assuredly to reckon, for it was a power which every day grew more formidable.

And for the first time, too, the pagan Emperors learnt from their officials that this new sect was not made up of Jews, as had been hitherto generally assumed, but that its members were something quite different—far, far more formidable and dangerous. It was true that there was no suggestion of any open revolt on the part of this strange group of subjects, such as Vespasian and Hadrian had to meet and to crush at Jerusalem and in Palestine in the case of the Jews; the danger to be feared from the Christians was that they were gradually winning the people's hearts; that they were turning the people's thoughts from the old gods of Rome to another and far greater Being, whom they averred was the loving Lord of all men, the supreme arbiter of life and death.

And to Emperors like the Antonines, whose devout minds ever loved to dwell on the constant protection of the Immortals, who they were persuaded had loved Rome from time immemorial, in whom they strove with sad earnestness to believe, to whom they prayed and taught their people to pray,—to Emperors like Pius and Marcus these Christians, with their intense faith, a faith for which they were only too ready to die, were indeed abhorrent; in their eyes they constituted an ever-present, an ever-increasing danger to Rome, her glorious traditions, her ancient religion, her very existence.

This was the secret of the new policy pursued by the State in its treatment of the Christians. It began to be adopted in the last years of Hadrian after the close of the great Jewish war in 134-5, when the Christian sect was discovered to be utterly separate from the Jews—distinct and even hostile to the Jewish race, with other and far more dangerous views and hopes; and when Antoninus Pius set himself to reform his people by reminding them of the manners and customs of their ancestors, by impressing upon them the duty of a