, or
pass judgment on the conduct of the Emperor as though he were living in
the nineteenth century, or as though he had been acting in full
cognisance of the Gospels and the stones of the Saints. Wise and good
men before him had, in their haughty ignorance, spoken of Christianity
with execration and contempt. The philosophers who surrounded his throne
treated it with jealousy and aversion. The body of the nation firmly
believed the current rumours which charged its votaries with horrible
midnight assemblies, rendered infamous by Thyestian banquets and the
atrocities of nameless superstitions. These foul calumnies--these
hideous charges of cannibalism and incest,--were supported by the
reiterated perjury of slaves under torture, which in that age, as well
as long afterwards, was preposterously regarded as a sure criterion
of truth.

Christianity in that day was confounded with a multitude of debased and
foreign superstitions; and the Emperor in his judicial capacity, if he
ever encountered Christians at all, was far more likely to encounter
those who were unworthy of the name, than to become acquainted with the
meek, unworldly, retiring virtues of the calmest, the holiest, and the
best. When we have given their due weight to considerations such as
these we shall be ready to pardon Marcus Aurelius for having, in this
matter, acted ignorantly, and to admit that in persecuting Christianity
he may most honestly have thought that he was doing God service. The
very sincerity of his belief, the conscientiousness of his rule, the
intensity of his philanthrophy, the grandeur of his own philosophical
tenets, all conspired to make him a worse enemy of the Church than a
brutal Commodus or a disgusting Heliogabalus. And yet that there was not
in him the least _propensity_ to persecute; that these persecutions were
for the most part spontaneous and accidental; that they were in no
measure due to his direct instigation, or in special accordance with his
desire, is clear from the fact that the martyrdoms took place in Gaul
and Asia Minor, _not in Rome_. There must have been hundreds of
Christians in Rome, and under the very eye of the Emperor; nay, there
were even multitudes of Christians in his own army; yet we never hear of
his having molested any of them. Melito, Bishop of Sardis, in addressing
the Emperor, expresses a doubt as to whether he was really aware of the
manner in which his Christian subjects were treated. Justin Martyr,