emporary and superhuman history,--that of Jesus
Christ, the Son of God and Son of Man,--that the Christians of the first
two centuries labored to convert to their faith the whole Roman world.
Marcus Aurelius was contemptuously astonished at what he called the
obstinacy of the Christians; he knew not from what source these nameless
heroes drew a strength superior to his own, though he was at the same
time emperor and sage. It is impossible to assign with exactness the
date of the first footprints and first labors of Christianity in Gaul.
It was not, however, from Italy, nor in the Latin tongue and through
Latin writers, but from the East and through the Greeks, that it first
came and began to spread. Marseilles--and the different Greek colonies,
originally from Asia Minor and settled upon the shores of the
Mediterranean or along the Rhone, mark the route 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. 71), 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, amongst 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