e
and were the places whither the first Christian missionaries carried
their teaching: on this point the letters of the apostles and the
writings of the first two generations of their disciples are clear and
abiding proof.

In the West of the empire, especially in Italy, the Christians at their
first appearance were confounded with the Jews, and comprehended under
the same name. "The emperor Claudius," says Suetonius, "drove from Rome
(A.D. 52) the Jews who, at the instigation of Christus, were in
continual commotion." After the destruction of Jerusalem by Titus (A.D.
70), the Jews, Christian or not, dispersed throughout the empire; but
the Christians were not slow to signalize themselves by their religious
fervor, and to come forward everywhere under their own true name.

Lyons became the chief centre of Christian preaching and association in
Gaul. As early as the first half of the second century there existed
there a Christian congregation, regularly organized as a church, and
already sufficiently important to be in intimate and frequent
communication with the Christian churches of the East and West. There is
a tradition, generally admitted, that St. Pothinus, the first bishop of
Lyons, was sent thither from the East by the bishop of Smyrna, St.
Polycarp, himself a disciple of St. John. One thing is certain, that the
Christian Church of Lyons produced Gaul's first martyrs, among whom was
the bishop, St. Pothinus.

It was under Marcus Aurelius, the most philosophical and most
conscientious of the emperors, that there was enacted for the first time
in Gaul, against nascent Christianity, that scene of tyranny and
barbarity which was to be renewed so often and during so many centuries
in the midst of Christendom itself. In the eastern provinces of the
empire and in Italy the Christians had already been several times
persecuted, now with cold-blooded cruelty, now with some slight
hesitation and irresolution. Nero had caused them to be burned in the
streets of Rome, accusing them of the conflagration himself had kindled,
and, a few months before his fall, St. Peter and St. Paul had undergone
martyrdom at Rome. Domitian had persecuted and put to death Christians
even in his own family, and though invested with the honors of the
consulate.

Righteous Trajan, when consulted by Pliny the Younger on the conduct he
should adopt in Bithynia toward the Christians, had answered: "It is
impossible, in this sort of matter, to est