d
smashed them _con amore_, as you would kill a wasp; and with the greater
warmth and satisfaction, just because it was so difficult to get at them.
Those bishops were a set of fellows as mischievous as they were cowardly;
they would not come out and be killed, but they skulked in the desert, and
hid in masquerade. But why should gentlemen in office, opulent and happy,
set about worrying a handful of idiots, old, or poor, or boys, or women,
or obscure, or amiable and well-meaning men, who were but a remnant of a
former generation, and as little connected with the fanatics of Carthage,
Alexandria, or Rome, as the English freemasons may seem to be with their
namesakes on the continent? True, Christianity was a secret society, and
an illegal religion; but would it cease to be so when those harmless or
respectable inhabitants of the place had been mounted on the rack or the
gibbet?

And then, too, it was a most dangerous thing to open the door to popular
excitement;--who would be able to shut it? Once rouse the populace, and it
was all over with the place. It could not be denied that the bigoted and
ignorant majority, not only of the common people, but of the better
classes, was steeped in a bitter prejudice, and an intense, though latent,
hatred of Christianity. Besides the antipathy which arose from the
extremely different views of life and duty taken by pagans and Christians,
which would give a natural impulse to persecution in the hearts of the
former, there were the many persons who wished to curry favour at Rome
with the government, and had an eye to preferment or reward. There was the
pagan interest, extended and powerful, of that numerous class which was
attached to the established religions by habit, position, interest, or the
prospect of advantage. There were all the great institutions or
establishments of the place; the law courts, the schools of grammar and
rhetoric, the philosophic _exedrae_ and lecture-rooms, the theatre, the
amphitheatre, the market--all were, for one reason or another, opposed to
Christianity; and who could tell where they would stop in their onward
course, if they were set in motion? "Quieta non movenda" was the motto of
the local government, native and imperial, and that the more, because it
was an age of revolutions, and they might be most unpleasantly compromised
or embarrassed by the direction which the movement took. Besides, Decius
was not immortal; in the last twelve years eight emper