In Part I, our narrative was confined mainly to those propitious circumstances which made for the successful introduction of the gospel and the founding of the church of Christ. In Part II, we are to deal with those adverse events which led finally to the subversion of the Christian religion. We commence with the

1. Persecution of the Christians by the Jews.—The Messiah forewarned his disciples that they would be persecuted by the world, pointed out the reasons for it, and comforted them by reminding them that the world had hated him before it hated them; that the servant was not greater than his lord; and for that matter all the prophets which were before them had been persecuted by the generations in which they lived, and that, for the reason that they were not of the world, therefore the world hated and destroyed them.^[1]

2. Two special reasons may be assigned for the persecution of the saints by the Jews. 1. They looked upon Christianity as a rival religion to Judaism, a thing of itself sufficient to engender bitterness, jealousy, persecution. 2. If Christianity should live and obtain a respectable standing, the Jews of that generation must ever be looked upon as not only putting an innocent man to death, but as rejecting and slaying the Son of God. To crush this rival religion and escape the odium which the successful establishment of it would inevitably fix upon them, were the incentives which prompted that first general persecution which arose against the church in Jerusalem, and that commenced in the very first year after Messiah's ascension. 3. The extent of the persecution or the time of its continuance may not be determined; but that it was murderous may be learned from the fact that Stephen was slain,^[2] as was also James, the son of Zebedee,^[3] and James, the Just, brother of the Lord.^[4] The Apostle Peter was imprisoned and would doubtless have shared the fate of the other martyrs, but that he was delivered by an angel.^[5]

4. Nor was this persecution confined alone to Jerusalem; on the contrary the hate-blinded high priests and elders of the Jews in Palestine conferred with the Jews throughout the Roman provinces, and everywhere incited them to hatred of the Christians, exhorting them to have no connection with, and to do all in their power to destroy the "superstition," as the Christian religion was then called. Nor were they content with what they themselves could do, but they exhausted their ingenuity in efforts to incite the Romans against them. To accomplish this they charged that the Christians had treasonable designs against the Roman government, as "appeared by their acknowledging as their king one Jesus, a malefactor whom Pilate had most justly put to death."^[6]

5. The Jews themselves, however, were in no great favor with the Romans since their impatience of Roman restraint led them to be constantly on the eve of rebellion and sedition, and frequently to break out into deeds of violence against the Roman authority. This lack of favor rendered the power of the Jews unequal to their malice against the church of Christ.

6. The imperious nation, too, whose forefathers had rejected the prophets and at the last had crucified the Son of God with every circumstance of cruelty, crying out in the streets of their holy city, "crucify him, and let his blood be upon us and on our children,"^[7] were about to meet the calamities which their wickedness called down upon them. The Roman emperor Vespasian [Ves-pa-zhe-an], tired of their repeated seditions, at last sent an army under Titus to subjugate them. The Jews made a stubborn resistance and a terrible war followed. Jerusalem, crowded with people who had come into the city from the surrounding country to attend the Passover, was besieged for six months, during which time more than a million of her wretched inhabitants perished of famine. The city was finally taken, the walls thereof thrown down and the temple so completely destroyed that not one stone was left upon another. Thousands of Jews were cut to pieces and nearly a hundred thousand of those taken captive were sent into slavery.^[8] All the calamities predicted by the Messiah^[9] befell the city and people. Jerusalem from that time until now has been trodden down of the Gentiles; and will be until the times of the Gentiles are fulfilled.

7. According to Eusebius, the Christians escaped these calamities which befell the Jews; for the whole body of the church at Jerusalem, having been commanded by divine revelation, given to men of approved piety, removed from Jerusalem before the war and dwelt at Pella, beyond Jordan, where they were secure from the calamities of those times.^[10]

8. Persecution by the Romans.—It is more difficult to understand why the Romans should persecute the Christians than it is to see why the Jews did it. The Romans were polytheists, and affected the fullest religious liberty. The author of the "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" claims that this period of Roman history was the golden age of religious liberty. And such was the multitude of deities collected in Rome from various nations, and such the variety of worship to be seen in the great capital of the empire, that Gibbon has said:

Rome gradually became the common temple of her subjects; and the freedom of the city was bestowed on all the gods of mankind.^[11]

Furthermore, the same high authority says:

The various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world, were all considered by the people as being equally true; by the philosophers as all equally false; and by the magistrates as equally useful. And thus toleration produced not only mutual indulgences, but even religious concord.

9. The student who would learn why the mild and beautiful Christian religion was alone selected to bear the wrath and feel the vengeful power of Rome, must look deeper than the reasons usually assigned for the strange circumstance. It is superficial to say that the persecution was caused by the charges of immorality. The Roman authorities had the best of evidence that the charges were false. (See note 1, end of section). Equally absurd is it to assign as a cause the supposed atheism of the Christians, for that was the condition of nearly all Rome; while the charge that they were traitors to the emperor, and expected to see the empire supplanted by the kingdom of Christ—which some assign as the chief cause of Roman persecution—was treated with contempt by the emperors. (See note 2, end of section).

10. The true cause of the persecution was this: Satan knew there was no power of salvation in the idolatrous worship of the heathen, and hence let them live on in peace, but when Jesus of Nazareth and his followers came, in the authority of God, preaching the gospel, he recognized in that the principles and power against which he had rebelled in heaven, and stirred up the hearts of men to rebellion against the truth to overthrow it. This was the real cause of persecution, though it lurked under a variety of pretexts, the most of which are named in the above supposed causes.

11. The First Roman Persecution.—The first emperor to enact laws for the extermination of Christians was Nero. (See note 3, end of section). His decrees against them originated rather in an effort to shield himself from popular fury than any desire that he had to protect the religion of the State against the advancement of Christianity. Nero, wishing to witness a great conflagration, had set fire to the city of Rome. The flames utterly consumed three of the fourteen wards into which the city was divided, and spread ruin in seven others. It was in vain that the emperor tried to soothe the indignant and miserable citizens whose all had been consumed by the flames, and neither the magnificence of the prince, nor his attempted expiation of the gods could remove from him the infamy of having ordered the conflagration.

12. Therefore, [writes Tacitus, one of the most trustworthy of all historians], to stop the clamor Nero falsely accused and subjugated to the most exquisite punishments a people hated for their crimes, called Christians. The founder of the sect, Christ, was executed in the reign of Tiberius, by the Procurator Pontius Pilate. The pernicious superstition, repressed for a time, burst forth again; not only through Judea, the birth-place of the evil, but at Rome also, where everything atrocious and base centers and is in repute. Those first seized, confessed; then a vast multitude, detected by their means, were convicted, not so much of the crime of burning the city as of hatred of mankind. And insult was added to their torments; for being clad in skins of wild beasts they were torn to pieces by dogs; or affixed to crosses to be burned, were used as lights to dispel the darkness of night, when the day was gone. Nero devoted his garden to the show, and held circensian [sir-sen-shan] games, mixing with the rabble, or mounting a chariot, clad like a coachman. Hence, though the guilty and those meriting the severest punishment, suffered, yet compassion was excited, because they were destroyed, not for the public good, but to satisfy the cruelty of an individual.^[12]

13. Time of the Persecution.—The time of this persecution is fixed by the date of the great conflagration, which Tacitus set down as commencing on the 18th of July, A. D. 65. It lasted six days; and soon after that the persecution broke out.

14. Continuance and Extent of the Persecution.—How long this persecution lasted, and whether it was confined to the city of Rome or extended throughout the empire is difficult to determine. From some remarks made by Tertullian [Ter-tul-li-an], writing in the next century, it would seem that the decrees of Nero against the Christians of Rome were general laws, such as those afterwards passed by Domitian. But the inferences of his language are generally discredited or accounted the result of Tertullian's fervid rhetoric; and Gibbon's conclusion that the persecution was confined within the walls of Rome generally accepted.^[13] It was in this persecution, according to the tradition of the early Christian fathers, that Peter and Paul suffered martyrdom.

15. The Second Persecution.—The second persecution against the Christian church broke out in the year A. D. 93 or 94, under the reign of Domitian. It was during this persecution that the Apostle John was banished to Patmos. Eusebius states that at the same time, for professing Christ, Flavi Domitilla, the niece of Flavius Clemens, one of the consuls of Rome at the time, "was transported with many others, by way of punishment, to the island of Pontia." The pretext for this persecution is ascribed to the fears of Domitian that he would lose his empire. A rumor reached him that a person would arise from the relatives of Messiah who would attempt a revolution; whereupon the jealous nature of the emperor prompted him to begin this persecution. In it both Jews and Christians suffered, the emperor ordering that the descendants of David, especially, should be put to death. An investigation of the prospects of a revolution arising from such a quarter caused Domitian to dismiss the matter with contempt and order the persecution to cease.^[14] (See note 2, end of section).

NOTES.

1. Pliny's Testimony to the Morality of the Christians.—The character which this writer gives of the Christians of that age (his celebrated letter was written to Trajan early in the second century), and which was drawn from a pretty accurate inquiry, because he considered their moral principles as the point in which the magistrate was interested, is as follows: He tells the emperor that some of those who had relinquished the society, or who, to save themselves pretended that they had relinquished it, affirmed "that they were wont to meet together on a stated day, before it was light, and sang among themselves alternately a hymn to Christ as a God; and to bind themselves by an oath, not to the commission of any wickedness, but that they would not be guilty of theft, or robbery, or adultery; that they would never falsify their word, or deny a pledge committed to them when called upon to return it." This proves that a morality more pure and strict than was ordinary, prevailed at that time in Christian societies.—Paley's "Evidences."

2. Interview of Domitian and the Relatives of the Lord.—There were yet living of the family of our Lord the grandchildren of Judas, called the brother of our Lord according to the flesh. These were reported as being of the family of David, and were brought to Domitian by the evocaties. For this emperor was as much alarmed at the appearance of Christ as Herod. He put the question whether they were of David's race and they confessed that they were. He then asked them what property they had, or how much money they owned. And both of them answered, that they had between them only nine thousand denarii, and this they had not in silver, but in the value of a piece of land, containing only thirty-nine acres; from which they raised their taxes and supported themselves by their own labor. Then they also began to show their hands, exhibiting the hardness of their bodies, and the callosity formed by incessant labor on their hands, as evidence of their own labor. When asked also, respecting Christ and his kingdom, what was its nature, and when and where it was to appear, they replied that it was not a temporal nor an earthly kingdom, but celestial and angelic; that it would appear at the end of the world, when coming in glory he would judge the quick and the dead, and give to every one according to his works. Upon which Domitian despising them, made no reply; but treating them with contempt, as simpletons, commanded them to be dismissed, and by a decree ordered the persecution to cease.—Hegesippus, quoted by Eusebius.

3. Character of Nero.—Nero was the incarnation of depravity—the very name by which men are accustomed to express the fury of unrestrained malignity. Bad as he was, he was not worse than Rome. She had but her due. Nay, when he died the rabble and the slaves crowned his statue with garlands and scattered flowers over his grave. And why not? Nero never injured the rabble, never oppressed the slave. He murdered his mother, his brother, his wife, and was the tyrant of the wealthy, the terror of the successful. He rendered poverty sweet, for poverty alone was secure; he rendered slavery tolerable, for slaves alone or slavish men were promoted to power. The reign of Nero was the golden reign of the populace, and the holiday of the bondman.—Bancroft.

REVIEW.

1. Of what did Messiah warn his followers?

2. What reason may be assigned for the hatred of the world towards the people of God?

3. What special reason can you assign for the persecution of the Christians by the Jews?

4. What can you say of the bitterness and extent of the first great persecution?

5. What circumstance rendered the Jewish power to injure the Christians unequal to the malice?

6. Describe the great conflict between the Jews and the Romans.

7. By what means did the Christians living at Jerusalem escape the calamities of those times?

8. What makes it difficult to understand why the Romans persecuted the Christians?

9. What can you say of the charges of immorality as justifying Roman persecution? (Note 1).

10. What of the charge of treason? (Note 2).

11. What was the true cause of the persecution?

12. Who was the first emperor to enact laws against the Christians?

13. What was the character of Nero? (Note 3).

14. What was the incentive which prompted Nero to persecute the Christians? 15. What was the duration and extent of the first Roman persecution?

16. Under whose reign did the second Roman persecution begin?

17. On what was the persecution based?