The life and work of St. Paul

186 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST; PAUL,
which she was forced to be"a daily witness ; here^and there, perhaps,
of some
slave, oppressed and ignorant, and eager to find a refuge from the intolerable
indignities of ancient servitude ; but even if they could hope for this, how
far had they then advanced in the conversion of Heathendom, with all its
splendid worldliness and glittering fascination P
For to the mass of the heathen, as I have said, their very persons were
hateful from the mere fact that they were Jews. 1 And so far from escaping
this hatred, the missionaries were certain to be doubly hated as Christian Jews.
For during the first century of Christianity, the ancients never condescended
to inquire what was the distinction between a Jew and a Christian. 2 To them
a Christian was only a more dangerous, a more superstitious, a more outrageously
intolerable Jew, who added to the follies of the Jew the yet more inex-
plicable folly of adoring a crucified malefactor. It is to the supposed turbulence
of One whom he ignorantly calls Chrestus, and imagines to have been still
living, that Suetonius attributes the riots which cost the Jews their expulsion
from Rome. The stolid endurance of agony by the Christians under persecu-
3
tion woke a sort of astonished admiration but even ;
Pliny, though his candid
account of the Christians in Bithynia refutes his own epithets, could only call
Christianity " a distorted and outrageous superstition ;" and Tacitus and
Suetonius, using the substantive, only qualify it by the severer epithets of
" deadly," " pernicious," and " new." 4
The heathen world into which, " as lambs among wolves," the Apostles
were going forth, was at that moment in its worse condition. The western
regions, towards which the course of missions took its way, were prevalently
Greek and Roman ; but it was a conquered Greece and a corrupted Rome.
It was a Greece which had lost its genius and retained its falsity, a Rome
which had lost its simplicity and retained its coarseness. It was Greece in
her lowest stage of seducer and parasite ; it was Rome at the epoch
of her
most gorgeous gluttonies and her most gilded rottenness. The heart of the
Roman Empire under the Caesars was " a fen of stagnant waters." Csesarism
has found its modern defenders, and even a Tiberius has had his eulogists
among the admirers of despotic power; but no defence can silence the
damning evidence of patent facts. No advocacy can silence the awful
indictment which St. Paul writes to the inhabitants of the 5
imperial city. If
such things were done in the green tree, what was done in the dry ? What
was the condition of the thistles,
if this was the code of the forest-trees ? If
St. John in the Apocalypse describes Rome as the harlot city which had made
the nations drunk with the cup of the wine of her fornications, he uses
1 See Excursus XTV., "Hatred of the Jews in Classical Antiquity."
3 In Dio (Irvii. 1214) the Christian (?) martyr Aottius Glabrio is called a Jew,
3 Marc. Aurel. xi. 3 ; Mart. x. 25 ; Epict. Dissert, iv. 8.
4 " "
Plin. Ep. x. 97, superstitionem pravam efc immodicam ; Tac. Ann. xv. 44, "exitiabilis
superstitio ;" Suet. Nero. 16, "novae et maleficae superstitionis." See Excursus XV.,
"Judgments of Early Pagan "Writers on Christianity."
6 See Friedliinder, Sittengcech. Horns. B. v. Denis, Icttt* Morale* data
ii. 218-236t