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72 DARKNESS AND DAWN
CHAPTEE XI
'A FOREIGN SUPERSTITION'
'Quos, per flagitia invisos, vulgus Christianos appellabat.' TACITUS,
Ann. xv. 44.
THE young son of Claudius, burdened as he was by a sense
of wrong, was not only cheered by the kindness of the conqueror
of Britain, but had been deeply interested in all that
he had heard from his high-minded wife. Pomponia had
warned him that to mention the subject of their conversation
might needlessly imperil her life, and to no one did he venture
to say a word on the subject except to Pudeus. It struck him
that in the words and bearing of the handsome young soldier
there was something not unlike the moral sincerity which he
admired and loved in Pomponia Graecina.
'Pudens,' he said to him the next morning, when Titus was
absent, what '
do you think of the Christians '
?
Pudeus started ; but, recovering himself, he said, coldly,
'
The Christians in Rome are humble and persecuted. Most
persons confuse them with the Jews, but many Jews are
nobler specimens than the beggars on the bridges, and many
Christians are not Jews at all.'
'
'
Are they such wretches as men say
?
'
No, Britannicus, they are not. A man may call himself a
Christian, and be a bad man; but it is so perilous to be a
Christian that most of them are perfectly sincere. They
preach innocence, and they practise
it. You know well
enough that the air is full of lies, and certainly not onetenth
part of what is said of the Christians has in it the
least truth.'
The time had not yet come for Pudens to avow that his
Claudia had been secretly baptised by an early missionary
in Britain, as Pomponia had been in Gaul and that he
;
himself was beginning seriously to study the doctrines of
the hated sect.