sons which led the populace to hate Christians,
whom, first of all, they regarded as being unpatriotic. While among
Romans it was considered the highest honor to possess the
privileges of Roman citizenship, the Christians announced that they
were citizens of heaven. They shrank from public office and
military service.

Again, the ancient religion of Rome was an adjunct of state dignity
and ceremonial. It was hallowed by a thousand traditional and
patriotic associations. The Christians regarded its rites and its
popular assemblies with contempt and abhorrence. The Romans viewed
the secret meetings of the Christians with suspicion, and accused
them of abominable excesses and crime. They were known to have
representatives in every important city of Gaul, Spain, Italy, and
Asia; and the more their communities grew, the more the Roman
populace raged against them. Only such considerations appear to
mitigate the historical judgments against Aurelius for marring the
splendor of his reign by persecutions. The tragedies enacted in the
churches of Lyons and Vienne, as described in the following pages,
form one of the most melancholy records of history.

When Christianity began to penetrate into Gaul, it encountered there two
religions very different one from the other, and infinitely more
different from the Christian religion; these were Druidism and
paganism--hostile one to the other, but with a hostility political only,
and unconnected with those really religious questions that Christianity
was coming to raise.

Druidism, considered as a religion, was a mass of confusion, wherein the
instinctive notions of the human race concerning the origin and destiny
of the world and of mankind were mingled with the oriental dreams of
metempsychosis--that pretended transmigration, at successive periods, of
immortal souls into divers creatures. This confusion was worse
confounded by traditions borrowed from the mythologies of the East and
the North, by shadowy remnants of a symbolical worship paid to the
material forces of nature, and by barbaric practices, such as human
sacrifices, in honor of the gods or of the dead.

People who are without the scientific development of language and the
art of writing do not attain to systematic and productive religious
creeds. There is nothing to show that, from the first appearance of the
Gauls in history to th