- ful for his soul. Ah, it is Jesus Christ that I venerate in this
young man; for surely every faithful soul proceeds from God, and every humble man of heart comes from the very heart of Christ."[1]
There is little doubt but that this authoritative teaching of the Christian masters in the matter of the perfect equality of the slave in the eyes of God, and the consequent tender and often loving treatment meted out to the Christian members of the despised and downtrodden class, gravely misliked the more thoughtful among the pagan aristocracy of Rome, and that this teaching and practice of Christians in the case of the vast slave class in the pagan Empire ranked high among the dangers which they felt threatened the existence of the old state of things. Grave considerations of this kind must have strongly influenced the minds of men like Pius and Marcus and their entourage, before they determined to carry out their bitter policy of persecution.
The Romans of the old school could have well afforded to regard with comparative indifference the enfranchisement of any number of Christian slaves. Freedmen, especially in the imperial household, were very numerous in the days of the Antonines. But the teaching that these slaves—while still slaves—were their brethren, and ought to be treated with love and esteem, was a new and disturbing thought in the Empire of the great Antonines.
Lecky, in his History of European Morals (chap. iv.), has a fine passage in which he sums up the great features of the new movement of Christian charity, and its results on the world at large. It runs as follows:
"There is no fact of which an historian becomes more steadily or more painfully conscious than the great difference between the importance and the dramatic interest of the subjects he treats. Wars or massacres, the horrors of martyrdom or the splendour of individual prowess, are susceptible of such brilliant colouring that with but very little literary skill they can be so portrayed that their importance is adequately realized, and that they appeal powerfully to the emotions of the
- ↑ S. Paulinus of Nola to Sulpicius Severus, Ep. xxiii.
