h language is echoed by Roman writers of every
character and class. The fact is that at this time and for centuries
afterwards the Romans regarded the Christians with such lordly
indifference that--like Festus, and Felix and Seneca's brother
Gallio--they never took the trouble to distinguish them from the Jews.
The distinction was not fully realized by the Pagan world till the cruel
and wholesale massacre of the Christians by the pseudo-Messiah
Barchochebas in the reign of Adrian opened their eyes to the fact of the
irreconcilable differences which existed between the two religions. And
pages might be filled with the ignorant and scornful allusions which the
heathen applied to the Jews. They confused them with the whole degraded
mass of Egyptian and Oriental impostors and brute-worshippers; they
disdained them as seditious, turbulent, obstinate, and avaricious; they
regarded them as mainly composed of the very meanest slaves out of the
gross and abject multitude; their proselytism they considered as the
clandestine initiation into some strange and revolting mystery, which
involved as its direct teachings contempt of the gods, and the negation
of all patriotism and all family affection; they firmly believed that
they worshipped the head of an ass; they thought it natural that none
but the vilest slaves and the silliest woman should adopt so
misanthropic and degraded a superstition; they characterized their
customs as "absurd, sordid, foul, and depraved," and their nation as
"prone to superstition, opposed to religion." [48] And as far as they
made _any_ distinction between Jews and Christians, it was for the
latter that they reserved their choicest and most concentrated epithets
of hatred and abuse. A "new," "pernicious," "detestable," "execrable,"
superstition is the only language with which Suetonius and Tacitus
vouchsafe to notice it. Seneca,--though he must have heard the name of
Christian during the reign of Claudius (when both they and the Jews were
expelled from Rome, "because of their perpetual turbulence, at the
instigation of Chrestus," as Suetonius ignorantly observed), and during
the Neronian persecution--never once alludes to them, and only mentions
the Jews to apply a few contemptuous remarks to the idleness of their
sabbaths, and to call them "a most abandoned race."

[Footnote 46: 2 Cor. viii. 2.]

[Footnote 47: [Greek: _Echleuazon_], Acts xvii. 32. The word expresses
the most profound and unconcealed co