as it were another
people, had been initiated into those abhorred mysteries. A more careful
inquiry soon demonstrated, that the offenders did not exceed seven
thousand; a number indeed sufficiently alarming, when considered as the
object of public justice. [168] It is with the same candid allowance that
we should interpret the vague expressions of Tacitus, and in a former
instance of Pliny, when they exaggerate the crowds of deluded fanatics
who had forsaken the established worship of the gods. The church of Rome
was undoubtedly the first and most populous of the empire; and we are
possessed of an authentic record which attests the state of religion in
that city about the middle of the third century, and after a peace of
thirty-eight years. The clergy, at that time, consisted of a bishop,
forty-six presbyters, seven deacons, as many sub-deacons, forty-two
acolythes, and fifty readers, exorcists, and porters. The number of
widows, of the infirm, and of the poor, who were maintained by the
oblations of the faithful, amounted to fifteen hundred. [169] From
reason, as well as from the analogy of Antioch, we may venture
to estimate the Christians of Rome at about fifty thousand. The
populousness of that great capital cannot perhaps be exactly
ascertained; but the most modest calculation will not surely reduce
it lower than a million of inhabitants, of whom the Christians might
constitute at the most a twentieth part. [170]

[Footnote 167: Ingens multitudo is the expression of Tacitus, xv. 44.]

[Footnote 168: T. Liv. xxxix. 13, 15, 16, 17. Nothing could exceed
the horror and consternation of the senate on the discovery of the
Bacchanalians, whose depravity is described, and perhaps exaggerated, by
Livy.]

[Footnote 169: Eusebius, l. vi. c. 43. The Latin translator (M.
de Valois) has thought proper to reduce the number of presbyters to
forty-four.]

[Footnote 170: This proportion of the presbyters and of
the poor, to the rest of the people, was originally fixed by Burnet,
(Travels into Italy, p. 168,) and is approved by Moyle, (vol. ii. p.
151.) They were both unacquainted with the passage of Chrysostom, which
converts their conjecture almost into a fact.]

The western provincials appeared to have derived the knowledge of
Christianity from the same source which had diffused among them the
language, the sentiments, and the manners of Rome.

In this more important circumstance, Africa, as well as Gaul, was
gradually fas