CHAPTER XI. THE FOUR GREAT PERSECUTIONS.
Obscurity and Insignificance of Early Reformers their best Protection—Christians the Great Levellers—Nero’s Persecution—The Blood of the Martyrs the Seed of the Church—Persecution of Domitian—Martyrdoms under Trajan—Tortures under Antoninus.
We have seen, in the preceding chapter, why Christianity must, upon its first introduction, have been universally and virulently opposed by the established powers of the world; and how, but for the lowliness and obscurity of its first propagators, it must, by attracting the notice of the wealthy and powerful, have been crushed at once, instead of making the amazing progress it did, before its persecutions began.
When the interests of wealth and power adjudged it necessary to crucify the Founder, their comparative insignificance could alone be a protection for his disciples and followers. And the supposed cause of their being spared so long is the fact of their appearing to the Roman governors only as a sect of Jews who had seceded from their brethren on account of some non-important item of worship or doctrine, not worth inquiring into. It was a part of Roman policy, as we have seen, to tolerate all religions, and even to incorporate the gods of their subjects or allies along with their own. The Jews, like all other people subject to the empire, enjoyed this toleration; and so long as the Christians appeared to be only a sect of this singular people, they participated with them in the imperial protection. We have a remarkable proof of this in the case of St. Paul. When he returned to Jerusalem from his third apostolic mission, the favour with which he was received by his Christian brethren there, and the joy they manifested at the great success of his mission in Macedonia, Achaia, &c., roused the ire of his countrymen. It is related that some Jews of Asia (who had probably witnessed the fruits of his zeal and ability amongst the Gentiles in their own country), seeing him one day in the temple, gave instant vent to their bigoted or conservative rage, by pointing him out as the man who was aiming to destroy all distinction between Jew and Gentile. They charged him with teaching things contrary to the law of Moses, and with polluting the holy temple by bringing into it uncircumcised heathen. The effect of this was to enrage the multitude against St. Paul. They seized him, dragged him out of the temple, brutally maltreated him, and were on the point of putting him to death, when he was rescued out of their hands by Lysias, a Roman military tribune, and the then principal army-officers at Jerusalem. This conduct of Lysias towards the great apostle, taken in juxtaposition with the previous well-known efforts of Pontius Pilate to save Christ himself from the hands of his Jewish enemies, shows clearly enough that the early Christians had little to fear from the Romans, so long as they were deemed to be only a religious sect of the Jews, and to be aiming at a kingdom which “is not of this world.”
It became otherwise, however, as soon as the pagan priesthood and pagan magistracy began to discover that Christ’s kingdom would very materially affect this world, as well as the next. The priests, trembling for their revenues and estates, the magistrates and rulers for their power, and the rich generally for their wealth and station, became very Jews from the moment that discovery was made. A religion which proclaimed spiritual equality was, to the priest and rulers, undistinguishable from one that, if it did not proclaim, would very speedily lead to temporal equality as well; and the principle of community of goods, which so notoriously prevailed in some of the early churches, was point blank evidence of the levelling tendencies of the sect. Indeed, examining it philosophically, the religion could not be otherwise than social in its effect. For, as its main doctrines went to condemn riches (“lay not up for yourselves treasures,” &c.), to make power a trust for the governed, and not a profitable monopoly for governors (“let him who would be foremost amongst you be the servant of the rest,” &c.), and to exhibit this life as a mere probationary state for another and eternal one, in which the poor of this world were likely to fare better than the rich (“it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven”),—as these and the like were amongst the vital doctrines of the new religion, it is impossible that such as embraced it with a firm belief in its ordinances, and promises of future rewards and punishment, could dare to rob and enslave their fellow-creatures, or peril their eternal salvation in another world for the sake of enjoying the mammon of unrighteousness in this for the brief space of a few years. These conclusions being but strictly logical deductions from Christian premisses, it is no wonder that a people, whom one of their own historians (Sallust) represents as valuing riches, honour, and empire as the greatest goods the immortal gods could vouchsafe to man, should regard with an evil eye a religion which threatened them with the loss of all, by bringing them into contempt, and making the possession of them a peril to salvation.
At all events, such was the impression made upon the pagan mind. Had they regarded Christ’s kingdom as pertaining only to another world, they would have cheerfully made his followers a present of it, on condition that they did not meddle with this. But in the face of such levelling doctrines, and in presence of a faith so lively and ardent, which made hosts of men renounce their temporal possessions in order to render themselves worthy of the new dispensation, the higher and wealthier orders of the empire soon became convinced that they would lose their kingdoms in this world if they allowed any further scope to that new and strange religion which promised so much in the next.
Hence originated that series of persecutions so well known in the history of the Christian church, and which lasted upwards of three hundred years. According to the best accounts, it began about A.D. 64, in the reign of Nero. Although the mummeries and monstrosities of polytheism were openly derided by St. Paul and others from the first starting of their missions, yet it does not appear that any public acts of legislation or administration were directed against Christianity till this period, when it had acquired such extension and stability as to make it truly formidable. It was then the Roman authorities began to blame themselves for their toleration, and to wonder that the Jews had found it so difficult to infuse into the breasts of Roman magistrates that rancour and virulence so conspicuous in the Jews themselves. Moreover, the open attacks upon paganism continually made by the Christians rendered them extremely obnoxious to the populace, who considered their understandings as well as their gods insulted by every sermon directed against them. They retorted upon the Christians by stigmatising them as atheists, and at the instigation of their priests, secretly backed by the rich, called loudly upon the civil magistrates to suppress them by force, as a body of seditious conspirators whose object was to destroy the politico-religious constitution of the empire. As happens in the suppression of all popular movements, lies and inventions the most horrid, imputing to them all manner of abominations, were circulated all over the empire, and, by these and like circumstances, the minds of all classes of pagans were prepared to regard with pleasure or indifference any amount of cruelty and wrong that interested vengeance might wreak upon them. In short, the sort of feeling that was got up against the Socialists and Red Republicans of France, before and after the June insurrection, will convey the best idea of the public opinion which was manufactured in Nero’s time to prepare men’s minds for the terrible proscriptions that followed. Indeed, many of the designations of horror applied to modern Socialists are little else than translations of the Latin terms so copiously lavished upon the poor Christians.