for nascent Christianity an
unequalled good fortune that its first attempts at association,
essentially communistic, were so soon broken up. Essays of this kind
engender such shocking abuses that communistic establishments are
condemned to crumble away in a very short time or to ignore very soon
the principle upon which they are founded.

Thanks to the persecution of the year 37, the cenobitic Church of
Jerusalem was saved from the test of time. It was nipped in the bud
before interior difficulties had undermined it. It remained like a
splendid dream, the memory of which animated in their life of trial all
those who had formed part of it, like an ideal to which Christianity
incessantly aspires without ever succeeding in reaching its goal.

The leading part in the persecution we have just related belonged to
that young Saul, whom we have above found abetting, as far as in him
lay, the murder of Stephen. This hot-headed youth, furnished with a
permission from the priests, entered houses suspected of harboring
Christians, laid violent hold on men and women, and dragged them to
prison or before the tribunals. Saul boasted that there was no one of
his generation so zealous as himself for the traditions. True it is that
often the gentleness and the resignation of his victims astonished him;
he experienced a kind of remorse; he fancied he heard these pious women,
whom, hoping for the Kingdom of God, he had cast into prison, saying
during the night, in a sweet voice, "Why persecutest thou us?" The blood
of Stephen, which had almost smothered him, sometimes troubled his
vision. Many things that he had heard said of Jesus went to his heart.
This superhuman being, in his ethereal life, whence he sometimes
emerged, revealing himself in brief apparitions, haunted him like a
spectre. But Saul shrunk with horror from such thoughts; he confirmed
himself with a sort of frenzy in the faith of his traditions, and
meditated new cruelties against those who attacked him. His name had
become a terror to the faithful; they dreaded at his hands the most
atrocious outrages and the most sanguinary treacheries.

The persecution of the year 37 had for its result, as is always the
case, the spread of the doctrine which it was wished to arrest. Till now
the Christian preaching had not extended far beyond Jerusalem; no
mission had been undertaken; enclosed within its exalted but narrow
communion, the mother Church had spread no halos around herself