birth. Its first enemies were the Jews, who forced the Roman governor
of Judaea to crucify Christ; who stoned St. Stephen, the first martyr,
and so set themselves against St. Paul that they almost compassed his
death.

Then came the persecution by the Pagans. The Romans tolerated all the
religions of the East because the devotees of Osiris, of Mithra, and
of the Good Goddess recognized at the same time the Roman gods. But
the Christians, worshippers of the living God, scorned the petty
divinities of antiquity. More serious still in the eyes of the Romans,
they refused to adore the emperor as a god and to burn incense on the
altar of the goddess Roma. Several emperors promulgated edicts
against the Christians, bidding the governors arrest them and put them
to death. A letter of Pliny the Younger, then governor in Asia, to the
emperor Trajan, shows the procedure against them. "Up to this time,
regarding the people who have been denounced as Christians, I have
always operated as follows: I asked them if they were Christians; if
they confessed it, I put the question to them a second time, and then
a third time, threatening them with the penalty of death. When they
persisted, I had them put to death, convinced that, whatever their
fault that they avowed, their disobedience and their resolute
obstinacy merited punishment. Many who have been denounced in
anonymous writings have denied that they were Christians, have
repeated a prayer that I pronounced before them, have offered wine and
incense to your statue, which I had set forth for this purpose
together with the statues of the gods, and have even reviled the name
of Christ. All these are things which it is not possible to compel any
true Christians to do. Others have confessed that they were
Christians, but they affirm that their crime and their error consisted
only in assembling on certain days before sunrise to adore Christ as
God, to sing together in his honor, and to bind themselves by oath to
commit no crime, to perpetrate no theft, murder, adultery, nor to
violate their word. I have believed it necessary in order to secure
the truth to put to the torture two female slaves whom they called
deaconesses; but I have discovered only an absurd and exaggerated
superstition."

The Roman government was a persecutor,[165] but the populace were
severer yet. They could not endure these people who worshipped another
god than theirs and contemned their deities. Whenever famine o