provided for the restitution of any of their lands or buildings which
had been alienated from them. "It is plain," he says, "from the terms of
this edict, that the Christians had for some time been in possession of
property. It speaks of houses and lands which did not belong to
individuals, but to the whole body. Their possession of such property
could hardly have escaped the notice of the government; but it seems to
have been held in direct violation of a law of Diocletian, which
prohibited corporate bodies or associations which were not legally
recognized, from acquiring property. The Christians were certainly not a
body recognized by law at the beginning of the reign of Diocletian, and
it might almost be thought that this enactment was specially directed
against them. But, like other laws which are founded upon tyranny, and
are at variance with the first principles of justice, it is probable
that this law about corporate property was evaded. We must suppose that
the Christians had purchased lands and houses before the law was passed;
and their disregard of the prohibition may be taken as another proof
that their religion had now taken so firm a footing that the executors
of the laws were obliged to connive at their being broken by so numerous
a body."

No wonder that the magistrate who presided at the martyrdom of St.
Romanus calls them in Prudentius "a rebel people"; that Galerius speaks
of them as "a nefarious conspiracy"; the heathen in Minucius, as "men of
a desperate faction"; that others make them guilty of sacrilege and
treason, and call them by those other titles which, more closely
resembling the language of Tacitus, have been noticed above. Hence the
violent accusations against them as the destructors of the empire, the
authors of physical evils, and the cause of the anger of the gods.

"Men cry out," says Tertullian, "that the State is beset, that the
Christians are in their fields, in their forts, in their islands. They
mourn as for a loss that every sex, condition, and now even rank is
going over to this sect. And yet they do not by this very means advance
their minds to the idea of some good therein hidden; they allow not
themselves to conjecture more rightly, they choose not to examine more
closely. The generality run upon a hatred of this name, with eyes so
closed that in bearing favorable testimony to anyone they mingle with it
the reproach of the name. 'A good man Caius Seius, only he is a
Christi