many hearts against himself, by torturing men and women,
on whose agonies he thought that the populace would gaze not only with a
stolid indifference, but even with fierce satisfaction?

Gibbon has conjectured that the Christians were confounded with the
Jews, and that the detestation universally felt for the latter fell with
double force upon the former. Christians suffered even more than the
Jews because of the calumnies so assiduously circulated against them,
and from what appeared to the ancients to be the revolting absurdity of
their peculiar tenets. "Nero," says Tacitus, "exposed to accusation, and
tortured with the most exquisite penalties, a set of men detested for
their enormities, whom the common people called 'Christians.' Christus,
the founder of this sect, was executed during the reign of Tiberius, by
the procurator Pontius Pilate, and the deadly superstition, suppressed
for a time, began to burst out once more, not only throughout Judea,
where the evil had its root, but even in the city, whither from every
quarter all things horrible or shameful are drifted, and find their
votaries."

The lordly disdain which prevented Tacitus from making any inquiry into
the real views and character of the Christians is shown by the fact that
he catches up the most baseless allegations against them. He talks of
their doctrines as savage and shameful when they breathed the very
spirit of peace and purity. He charges them with being animated by a
hatred of their kind when their central tenet was a universal charity.
The masses, he says, called them "Christians"; and while he almost
apologizes for staining his page with so vulgar an appellation,[30] he
merely mentions in passing that, though innocent of the charge of being
turbulent incendiaries, on which they were tortured to death, they were
yet a set of guilty and infamous sectaries, to be classed with the
lowest dregs of Roman criminals.

But the haughty historian throws no light on one difficulty--namely, the
circumstances which led to the _Christians_ being thus singled out. The
Jews were in no way involved in Nero's persecution. To persecute the
Jews at Rome would not have been an easy matter. They were sufficiently
numerous to be formidable, and had overawed Cicero in the zenith of his
fame. Besides this, the Jewish religion was recognized, tolerated,
licensed. Throughout the length and breadth of the empire no man,
however much he and his race might be detested an