Page:The early Christians in Rome (1911).djvu/143

 In the works of Tertullian we come across such statements as the following:

"The grievance (of the pagan government) is that the State is filled with Christians; that they are in the fields, in the citadels, in blocks of houses (which fill up the cities). It grieves (does the government), as over some calamity, that both sexes indifferently, all ages, every condition, even persons of high rank, are passing over to the Christian ranks."

And again: "We are not Indian Brahmins who dwell in forests and exile themselves from the common life of men We company with you in the world, forsaking neither the life of the Forum, nor the Bath, nor Workshop, nor Inn, nor Market-place, nor any Mart of commerce. We sail with you, fight with you, till the ground with you, even we share in the various arts."

About fifty years after Tertullian's writing just quoted, Cornelius, bishop of Rome, 251, in an Epistle addressed to Fabius, bishop of Antioch, gives some official statistics of the Roman Church in his days. Cornelius particularizes the classes of the various officials, together with the numbers of persons in distress who were on the lists of the Church receiving charitable relief. Scholars and experts, basing their calculations upon these official statistics, variously estimate the numbers of Christians in the city of Rome at from 30,000 to 50,000, the latter calculation on the whole being probably nearest to the truth.

Lastly, in this little sketch of the vast numbers of disciples who at a very early date had joined the Christian community, the changeless testimony of the Roman catacombs must be cited. Much will be found written in this work regarding these enormous cemeteries of the Christian dead. It is absolutely certain that in the second half of the first century these catacombs were already begun.

The words of the eminent German scholar Harnack may well be quoted here: "The number, the size, and the extent of the Roman catacombs is so great that even from them we may infer the size of the Roman Church, its steady