IV
REASONS OF THE PERSECUTING POLICY OF THE ANTONINES
Among the subjects of the Empire only one group stood persistently aloof from the crowds of worshippers who again thronged these time-honoured shrines; this group refused to share in the ancient Roman cult which the Antonines had once more made the vogue in Rome and in her provinces, a cult to which these great pagan Emperors ever referred the glories of the past, and on which they grounded their hopes of a yet more splendid future for Rome.
The solitary group was indeed a strange one. To a Roman like Antoninus Pius it appeared to be composed of a sect, comparatively speaking, of yesterday; for when his predecessor Augustus reigned and Vergil wrote, it had no existence. It was a sect professing, as it seemed to the Emperor, a new religion—a religion which claimed for the One it worshipped a solitary supremacy—a religion which regarded the awful gods of Rome as shadows, as mere phantoms of the imagination. Well might sovereigns like the Antonines shudder at a teaching which would appear to a true patriot Roman, whose heart was all aflame with national pride, to involve the most daring impiety, the most shocking blasphemy; which would threaten a tremendous risk for the future of her people, if this fatal teaching should spread.
And this strange sect of yesterday, the Emperors would hear from their officials, was multiplying to an enormous extent, not only in Rome but in all the provinces.
They would receive reports from all lands how the new community called Christian was daily adding fresh converts to its extraordinary and dangerous belief,—converts drawn from the ranks of the humblest traders, from slaves and freedmen—converts drawn, too, from the noblest families of the Empire.
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 A.D. 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 more earnest worship of the old gods of Rome, he found in the Christians his most dangerous opponents; hence the stern treatment which the new sect received at his hands; hence the policy of persecution which gathered strength during his reign, and was intensified in the days of his adopted son and successor Marcus.