After His resurrection He appeared among His disciples and commissioned them to evangelize the world. As they went about this work they encountered the same spirit of opposition that had met their Master. Whippings, imprisonment, and martyrdom confronted them on every hand, and when they extended their labors beyond the borders of Palestine, notwithstanding the general religious tolerance that obtained in the Roman empire, the Christians were everywhere spoken against, and their ministers everywhere opposed and persecuted.
Passing by the persecutions inflicted upon the Christians by the Jews—the whipping of Peter and John, under the order of the Jewish Sanhedrim, the martyrdom of Stephen, the execution of Saint James, the repeated mobbing and whippings of Paul—I call attention to the first great pagan persecution under the cruel edict of the Emperor Nero, in the second half of the first Christian century. The emperor having set on fire the city of Rome in order that he might view a great conflagration, and wishing to divert suspicion from himself, he first accused and then tried to compel the Christians to confess the crime. At this point I summon Tacitus, the renowned Roman annalist, to tell the remainder of the story:
"With this view he inflicted the most exquisite tortures on those men who, under the vulgar appellation of Christians, were already branded with deserved infamy. They derived their name and origin from Christ, who, in the reign of Tiberius, had suffered death by the sentence of the procurator Pontius Pilate. For awhile this dire superstition was checked, but it again burst forth, and not only spread itself over Judea, the first seat of this mischievous sect, but was even introduced into Rome, the common asylum, which receives and protects whatever is impure, whatever is atrocious. The confessions of those that were seized discovered a great multitude of their accomplices, and they were all convicted not so much for the crime of setting fire to the city, as for their hatred of human kind. They died in torments, and their torments were embittered by insults and derision. Some were nailed on crosses; others sewn up in the skins of wild beasts and exposed to the fury of dogs; others, again, smeared over with combustible materials, were used as torches to illuminate the darkness of the night. The gardens of Nero were destined for the melancholy spectacle, which was accompanied with a horse race, and honored with the presence of the emperor, who mingled with the populace in the dress and attitude of a charioteer. The guilt of the Christians deserved indeed the most exemplary punishments, but the public abhorrence was changed into commiseration from the opinion that those unhappy wretches were sacrificed, not so much to the public welfare as to the cruelty of a jealous tyrant."[[46]]
This first great persecution of the Christians under the authority of the Roman emperor, is sufficiently characteristic to describe the other persecutions which were intermittingly perpetrated upon the Christians through the two succeeding centuries. What seems to be the most incongruous circumstance connected with these persecutions is, that they occurred not only under such wretches as Nero and Domitian, but under such virtuous emperors as Trajan, Adrian, Marcus Aurelius and Diocletian. Intermittingly, then, through three troubled centuries, and under circumstances of the utmost cruelty, persecution raged against the Christians. As the highest authority on Roman history remarks: "If the empire had been afflicted by any recent calamity, by a plague, a famine, or an unsuccessful war; if the Tiber had, or the Nile had not risen above its banks; if the earth had shaken, or if the temperate order of the seasons had been interrupted, the superstitious pagans were convinced that the crimes and impurities of the Christians, who were spared by the excessive lenity of the government, had at length provoked the divine justice."[[47]] And however virtuous the emperors were, or however mild and equitable in character the governors of the provinces, it is certain that they did not hesitate to appease the rage of the people by sacrificing the obnoxious Christian victims. All this at a time, too, when religious tolerance and in large measure even religious freedom were enjoyed by those of all other religions within the empire, and in fact we may say that the persecution of the Christians was the only circumstance which broke in upon the religious concord of the world. From the apologies of the early church fathers, addressed to some of the emperors of the second and third centuries, we find them making the most pathetic complaints to the effect, "that the Christians who obeyed the dictates, and solicited the liberty of conscience, were alone, among all the subjects of the Roman empire, excluded from the common benefits of their auspicious government."
Why was this? Surely it did not arise from any vicious principle inherent in the Christian religion itself. "If we seriously consider the purity of the Christian religion," remarks Gibbon, in the opening paragraph of his great treatise on the "Conduct of the Roman Government Toward the Christians," "the sanctity of its moral precepts, and the innocence as well as the austere lives of the greater number of those who, during the first ages, embraced the faith of the gospel, we should naturally suppose that so benevolent a doctrine would have been received with due reverence even by the unbelieving world; that the learned and polite, however they might deride the miracles, would have esteemed the virtues of the new sect; and that the magistrates, instead of persecuting, would have protected an order of men who yielded the most passive obedience to the laws, though they declined the active cares of war and government. If, on the other hand, we recollect the universal tolerance of polytheism, as it was invariably maintained by the faith of the people, the incredulity of philosophers, and the policy of the Roman senate and emperors, we are at a loss to discover what new offense the Christians had committed, what new provocation could exasperate the mild indifference of antiquity, and what new motives could urge the Roman princes, who beheld without concern a thousand forms of religion subsisting in peace under their gentle sway, to inflict a severe punishment upon any part of their subjects who had chosen for themselves a singular but an inoffensive mode of faith and worship."[[48]]
What, then, I again ask, was the cause of the singular departure from the enlightened policy of the empire in granting religious toleration and even large religious freedom to its subjects? I am sure that modern Christians will scarcely be satisfied with the various causes assigned for this strange conduct on the part of the Roman emperors who persecuted the Christians. These causes, or at least the principal ones, are conceded by both infidel and Christian authorities to be:
First, the Christians were a sect and not a nation, and were open to the charge that they had deserted the faith of their forefathers, a thing inexplicable to the Roman mind. It could be claimed on the part of the Christians, of course, that this was not true; that so far were they from deserting the faith of their fathers, that their present Christian faith was but the complement of their fathers' faith, the fulfillment alike of its prophecies and symbols—in a word, the gospel was the fulfillment of the law. This, however, was a refinement of explanation to which the haughty Romans could not be expected to give attention.
Second, the Christians condemned and abhorred the public religion of the state, so closely connected with the affairs of the government, and hence they were judged to be enemies of the state, a circumstance which made them objects of detestation to those intrusted with the administration of the laws.
Third, the Christians in their worship employed no images, nor temples, nor incense, nor sacrifices; neither did they represent their God by any corporeal figure or symbol, therefore they were adjudged to be atheists, and accordingly detested.
Fourth, the gloom and austere aspect of the Christians, and their thorough abhorrence of the common business and pleasures of life, their denunciation of war, together with their frequent predictions of impending divine judgments, caused them to be regarded as the enemies of mankind.