NOTE VII.
Pliny, the friend of Tacitus, bears the following honourable testimony to the morals of the Christians of his day, then under sharp persecution. “The real Christians were not to be forced by any means whatever to renounce the articles of their belief.” He proceeds to the sum total of their guilt, which he found to be as follows: “They met on a stated day before it was light, and addressed themselves in a prayer or hymn to Christ, as to a god, binding themselves by a solemn oath (not for any wicked purpose) never to commit any fraud, theft, or adultery, never to falsify their word, nor deny a trust reposed in them; after which it was their custom to separate, and then reassemble to eat their meal together in a manner perfectly harmless and inoffensive.”
Tertullian, in a strain of exultation, declares that the Christians “for their innocence, their probity, justice, truth, and for the living God, were burnt alive. The cruelty, ye persecutors, is all your own, the glory is ours.”
Such were the Christians of the primitive times, of whom the world was not worthy.