“There is one God, and one only,” said Jesus; “and all idols are vanity and a lie.”
“All mankind are brethren,” said Jesus; “and God commands that every man should love his brother as himself.”
“The divine benediction,” said Jesus, “rests upon the lowly in spirit, the pure in heart; upon the peacemakers; upon those who visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and who practise every thing that is true and lovely and of good report. Repent of sin, seek pardon through faith in a Saviour who has died to atone for your sins, commence a life of devotion to the glory of God and to the welfare of your brother-man, and death shall introduce you to realms of honor, glory, and immortality.”
“God is no respecter of persons,” said Jesus. “The monarchand the slave stand alike at his tribunal. The wicked, and those who fear not God, shall be cast into hell. The smoke of their torment ascendeth for ever and ever.”
These offers of salvation to all who would repent and commence the Christlike life, these good news and glad tidings, were joyfully accepted by hundreds and by thousands of the poor and the oppressed and the world-weary; but the denunciations of divine wrath upon those who, by their enormities, were converting this world into a realm of woe, fell appallingly upon the ears of proud and unrelenting oppressors.
The teachings of Jesus were thus hateful to Nero. He hated that religion which condemned him. He hated those who preached it. He deliberately determined to blot out that religion from the world; to silence in death every tongue that proclaimed it. It was apparently an easy task to do this. Nero was monarch of the world. A resistless army moved unquestioning at his bidding. All power was apparently in his hands. He was a man, for the times, highly educated. He was endowed with intellectual shrewdness as well as physical energy, and could bring public opinion to bear against the Christians, while he assailed them with the axe of the headsman and the flames of martyrdom.
The Christians were few and feeble. To turn against them popular indignation, atrocious libels were fabricated. The Christians were in the habit of taking their infants to church to be baptized. Pagan slanderers affirmed that they were taken there to be offered in bloody sacrifice. The Christians often met to celebrate the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper: they ate of that bread which represented the body of Jesus broken for us; they drank of that wine emblematic of the blood of Jesus, shed for our sins. The pagans declared that the Christians were cannibals; that they secretly met in midnight feasts, and, having murdered a man, ate his flesh, and drank his blood.
Thus a terrible prejudice was created against the Christians. Many were deceived by these cruel slanders who would possibly have joined the disciples had they known the truth. Thusshrewdly Nero prepared the public mind for the outrages he was about to inflict upon those whom he had doomed to destruction. Even Tacitus, the renowned Roman historian, a man of much candor, was manifestly under the influence of these gross libels. In the following terms, he describes the first persecution of the Christians at Rome by Nero:—
“Christ, the founder of that name, was put to death as a criminal by Pontius Pilate, procurator of Judæa, in the reign of Tiberius. But the pernicious superstition, repressed for a time, broke out again, not only through Judæa, where the mischief originated, but through the city of Rome also, whither all things horrible and disgraceful flow from all quarters as to a common receptacle, and where they are encouraged. Accordingly, first those were seized who confessed that they were Christians; next, on their information, a vast multitude were convicted, not so much on the charge of burning the city, as of hating the human race.
“And in their deaths they were made the subject of sport; for they were covered with skins of wild beasts, and worried to death by dogs, or nailed to crosses, or set fire to, and, when day declined, burned to serve for nocturnal lights. Nero offered his own gardens for that spectacle, and exhibited a circensian game, indiscriminately mingling with the common people in the habit of a charioteer, or else standing in his chariot. Whence a feeling of compassion rose towards the sufferers, though guilty, and deserving to be made examples of by capital punishment,because they seem not to be cut off for the public good, but victims to the ferocity of one man.”[167]