ey, 'that these folk bring among us a new and strange religion,
that they set at naught the most painful torments, and that they go
joyfully to face death: let us see if they will rise again, if their God
will come to their aid and will be able to tear them from our hands.'"

It is not without a painful effort that, even after so many centuries,
we can resign ourselves to be witnesses, in imagination only, of such a
spectacle. We can scarce believe that among men of the same period and
the same city so much ferocity could be displayed in opposition to so
much courage, the passion for barbarity against the passion for virtue.
Nevertheless, such is history; and it should be represented as it really
was: first of all, for truth's sake; then for the due appreciation of
virtue and all it costs of effort and sacrifice; and, lastly, for the
purpose of showing what obstacles have to be surmounted, what struggles
endured, and what sufferings borne, when the question is the
accomplishment of great moral and social reforms. Marcus Aurelius was,
without any doubt, a virtuous ruler, and one who had it in his heart to
be just and humane; but he was an absolute ruler, that is to say, one
fed entirely on his own ideas, very ill-informed about the facts on
which he had to decide, and without a free public to warn him of the
errors of his ideas or the practical results of his decrees. He ordered
the persecution of the Christians without knowing what the Christians
were or what the persecution would be, and this conscientious
philosopher let loose at Lyons, against the most conscientious of
subjects, the zealous servility of his agents, and the atrocious
passions of the mob.

The persecution of the Christians did not stop at Lyons or with Marcus
Aurelius; it became, during the third century, the common practice of
the emperors in all parts of the empire: from A.D. 202 to 312, under the
reigns of Septimius Severus, Maximinus the First, Decius, Valerian,
Aurelian, Diocletian, Maximian, and Galerius, there are reckoned six
great general persecutions, without counting others more circumscribed
or less severe. The emperors Alexander Severus, Philip the Arabian, and
Constantius Chlorus were almost the only exceptions to this cruel
system; and nearly always, wherever it was in force, the pagan mob, in
its brutality or fanatical superstition, added to imperial rigor its own
atrocious and cynical excesses.

But Christian zeal was superior in per