rmest-minded
governers were able to moderate or to repress. Marcus, when appealed to,
simply let the existing law take its usual course. That law was as old
as the time of Trajan. The young Pliny, Governor of Bithynia, had
written to ask Trajan how he was to deal with the Christians, whose
blamelessness of life he fully admitted, but whose doctrines, he said,
had emptied the temples of the gods, and exasperated their worshippers.
Trajan in reply had ordered that the Christians should not be _sought_
for, but that, if they were brought before the governor, and proved to
be contumacious in refusing to adjure their religion, they were then to
be put to death. Hadrian and Antoninus Pius had continued the same
policy, and Marcus Aurilius saw no reason to alter it. But this law,
which in quiet times might become a mere dead letter, might at more
troubled periods be converted into a dangerous engine of persecution, as
it was in the case of the venerable Polycarp, and in the unfortunate
Churches of Lyons and Vienne. The Pagans believed that the reason why
their gods were smiling in secret,--

"Looking over wasted lands,
Blight and famine, plague and earthquake, roaring deeps and fiery
sands,--

"Clanging fights, and flaming towns, and sinking ships, and praying
hands,--"

was the unbelief and impiety of these hated Galileans, causes of offence
which could only be expiated by the death of the guilty. "Their
enemies," says Tertullian, "call aloud for the blood of the innocent,
alleging this vain pretext for their hatred, that they believe the
Christians to be the cause of every public misfortune. If the Tiber has
overflowed its banks, or the Nile has not overflowed, if heaven has
refused its rain, if famine or the plague has spread its ravages, the
cry is immediate, 'The Christians to the lions.'" In the first three
centuries the cry of "No Christianity" became at times as brutal, as
violent, and as unreasoning as the cry of "No Popery" has often been in
modern days. It was infinitely less disgraceful to Marcus to lend his
ear to the one than it has been to some eminent modern statesmen to be
carried away by the insensate fury of the other.

To what extent is Marcus Aurelius to be condemned for the martyrdoms
which took place in his reign? Not, I think, heavily or
indiscriminately, or with vehement sweeping censure. Common justice
surely demands that we should not confuse the present with the past