Page:The early Christians in Rome (1911).djvu/88

 it Trajan neither subtracted anything nor added anything; still, as has been very justly said, the humane and upright character of the Emperor and his minister Pliny—Pliny, by his evident, though carefully veiled, advice and suggestions based upon his protracted inquiries into the tenets and customs of the sect; Trajan, by his formal imperial "rescript"—secured some considerable mitigation in its enforcement.

The story of the correspondence between Pliny the Younger and the Emperor Trajan, which was fraught with such momentous consequences to the Christians of Rome and the Empire generally, is as follows:

When Pliny, about the middle of the year 111, came to the scene of his government,—the provinces of Bithynia and Pontus,—apparently somewhat to his surprise he found a very considerable portion of the population members of the Christian community. The religion professed by these people, Pliny was well aware, was unlawful in the eyes of the State, and the sect generally was unpopular; and evil rumours were current respecting its traditional practices.

The new governor knew of the existence of the sect in Rome, but little more. He was clearly aware that these Christians had been the object of many State persecutions and judicial inquiries, "cognitiones" he terms them, and no doubt knew something, too, of the public severity with which these adherents of an unlawful religion had been treated by the State when convicted of the crime of Christianity.

The horrors of the amphitheatre in the case of these condemned ones could not have been unknown to one like Pliny. But the great world in which Pliny lived and moved and worked, cared little for human life or human suffering in the case of a despised and outlawed community.

The Roman teacher and patrician of the days of Trajan held human life very cheaply. The amphitheatre games, to take one phase only of Roman life in the days of the Empire, were an evil education for Rome. The execution, the sufferings of a few score Christian outlaws, however frequently repeated, would attract very little attention in Pliny's world.