they were
the most harmless, they were also the most hated and the most slandered
of living men.

Why he should have thought of singling out the Christians has always
been a curious problem, for at this point St. Luke ends the Acts of the
Apostles, perhaps purposely dropping the curtain, because it would have
been perilous and useless to narrate the horrors in which the hitherto
neutral or friendly Roman government began to play so disgraceful a
part. Neither Tacitus, nor Suetonius, nor the Apocalypse, helps us to
solve this particular problem. The Christians had filled no large space
in the eye of the world. Until the days of Domitian we do not hear of a
single noble or distinguished person who had joined their ranks. That
the Pudens and Claudia of Rom. xvi. were the Pudens and Claudia of
Martial's _Epigrams_ seems to me to be a baseless dream. If the "foreign
superstition" with which Pomponia Graecina, wife of Aulus Plautius, the
conqueror of Britain, was charged, and of which she was acquitted, was
indeed, as has been suspected, the Christian religion, at any rate the
name of Christianity was not alluded to by the ancient writers who had
mentioned the circumstance. Even if Rom. xvi. was addressed to Rome, and
not, as I believe, to Ephesus, "they of the household of Narcissus which
were in the Lord" were unknown slaves, as also were "they of Caesar's
household."

The slaves and artisans, Jewish and Gentile, who formed the Christian
community at Rome, had never in any way come into collision with the
Roman government. They must have been the victims rather than the
exciters of the messianic tumults--for such they are conjectured to have
been--which led to the expulsion of the Jews from Rome by the futile
edict of Claudius. Nay, so obedient and docile were they required to be
by the very principles on which their morality was based, so far were
they removed from the fierce independence of the Jewish zealots, that,
in writing to them a few years earlier, the greatest of their leaders
had urged upon them a payment of tribute and a submission to the higher
powers, not only for wrath, but also for conscience' sake, because the
earthly ruler, in his office of repressing evil works, is a minister of
God. That the Christians were entirely innocent of the crime charged
against them was well known both at the time and afterward. But how was
it that Nero sought popularity and partly averted the deep rage which
was rankling in