CHAPTER XI.

Heathen Persecution first excited by Nero.-Renewed by Domitian. -St. John and the Grandchildren of St. Jude.-Condition of the Christians under Trajan.- Pliny's Letter.-Ignatius. - His Condemnation and Journey to Rome.-His Epistles.-Controversy respecting their Authenticity.-Bishop Pearson's Defence of them. -Syriac Manuscripts.--Examination of Archdeacon Churton's Arguments.-Martyrdom of Ignatius.

I HAVE said in a former chapter that the law passed under Nero, by which the profession of Christianity was made a capital offence, still continued on the statute-book under succeeding Emperors, probably till the time of Constantine: some modifications of it being introduced by one or other of the more humane princes, and the law itself often lying dormant for long intervals; always, however, capable of being put in force, and often actually put in force in one part of the empire or other, at the pleasure of an informer, a magistrate, or, most frequently of all, a mob. It will be now our business to take a rapid survey of the progress of the persecution of the Church through the first three centuries; this subject unhappily contributing a very main feature of the History of the Church during that period-a period which nevertheless witnessed, as we have already seen, the concurrent development of the Gospel throughout so large a portion of the known world.

The first distinguished victims of heathen persecution, as we have already said, were some of the Apostles themselves, St. Peter and St. Paul. They suffered at Rome,

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to which locality the tyranny seems chiefly to have confined itself in act, as the motive for the exercise of that tyranny was local, though the scope of the law which sanctioned it might be universal. For it does not appear to have been the doctrines or the practices of the Christians in the abstract which stimulated the secular power to annoy them, but the convenient scapegoat they afforded to bear away from the guilty party the obloquy of having set fire to Rome. So Tacitus represents the matter; who, though giving us to understand that the sect was certainly unpopular already-indeed, that unpopularity fitted them for the purpose-yet expressly ascribes the severities which Nero instituted against them to the cause I have said-his anxiety to transfer the infamy of the fire from himself to the Christians. A vast multitude" of victims perished on this occasion, and by modes of death which added insult to pain. They were dressed in the skins of wild beasts and hunted by dogs; they were crucified; they were cast to the flames; and when night came they were used to light up the streets and gardens. Their titles, however, though written in the book of life, are lost to the world, with the illustrious exceptions I have mentioned. Clemens Alexandrinus, to be sure, records a tradition of his own day, that the wife of St. Peter went before him to the death at this season, and that on seeing her led forth the Apostle expressed himself pleased that she had received the call, and was on her way home; and, addressing her by name, bid her be of good cheer, and remember the Lord.3

With the life of Nero ended the active persecution of the Christians for a time, to be next revived, about the year 95, by Domitian; himself, as Tertullian describes

1 Tertullian, Apol. § 5. 2 Tac. Annal. xv. § 44.

3 Stromat. vii. p. 869, Potter's Ed.

him, a semi-Nero in cruelty;' but who, he adds, having some touch of a man in him, soon desisted from his undertaking, and even recalled the persons he had banished— a statement so temperate as to carry on the face of it the marks of truth, and satisfy the candid inquirer that when Tertullian ascribes to this Emperor the character of a persecutor of the Christians he does so in no spirit of exaggeration, and with no disposition to multiply, without a cause, the wrongs of the Christians.2 Accordingly the particulars which have reached us of this persecution correspond with this announcement of it by the early Fathers; the paucity of them indicating that it could not have lasted very long; the nature of some of them that it could not be very intense. Flavius Clemens, consul of Rome, and cousin to the Emperor, is indeed the only person individually named as having been actually put to death. At the same time, others are reported to have escaped it very narrowly. Flavia Domitilla, the niece of this same Flavius, was banished to the island of Pontia; as was St. John to that of Patmos, having been previously plunged into a caldron of boiling oil, according to a history current in Tertullian's time, to which I have adverted already. Moreover the grandchildren of St. Jude (our Lord's brother) were summoned (as has been already noticed in this History) before the Emperor, in consequence of orders he had issued that the descendants of David should be slain; but as it appeared that they were only possessed of some four-and-twenty acres of landland cultivated by their own hands, which were hard with toil, and had no expectation of sharing in any earthly sovereignty, their hopes fixed on the kingdom which

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1 Tertullian, Apol. § 5.

2 See also Euseb. Eccl. Hist. iii. c. 17.

3 See Mosheim, De Rebus

Christian. p. 110, on the authority of Eusebius, in Chronico.

Euseb. Eccl. Hist. iii. c. 18.

Christ should establish when He came again in glory at the end of the world, to judge both the quick and the dead-they were contemptuously dismissed, and an end was put to the persecution.' It would seem, therefore, from these incidents, that the trouble, whatever it was, with which the Christians were now visited, reached to distant parts of the empire; for these grandchildren of St. Jude were, no doubt, resident in Judæa; and that it was prompted, not so much by the Emperor's horror of the character of the Christians, as by the suspicion which rankled in his breast, that, confounded as they were with the Jews, of whom the same had been predicted, they were destined to send forth a rival ruler of the world.

As the Christians had enjoyed an interval of repose between the reigns of Nero and Domitian, so did they again between those of Domitian and Trajan. But under the latter Emperor, humane as he was, and not accounted otherwise by the early Christian writers themselves, the sufferings of the Church were renewed, the field of them wide, the severity of them extreme. Meanwhile, we may trace in this alternation of storm and lull, God's providence fostering the cause He had in hand, which, under the influence of circumstances uniformly favouring it, might have suffered in simplicity, in integrity, in tenacity of hold, as it would certainly have lost an evidence of its sterling character which recommended it to so many; whilst, on the contrary, had the assault on it been both sharp and unremitting, it might, humanly speaking, have faltered under it, and not made a lodgment for itself on the earth without the utmost difficulty.

The condition of Christianity, however, under Trajan, I investigated some time ago, and endeavoured to show that Mosheim's views are incorrect, when he supposes

1 Euseb. Eccl. Hist. iii. c. 19, 20.

there were no laws against the Christians in existence on the accession of Trajan, founding that supposition chiefly on Pliny's celebrated Letter,' and that, accordingly, those of Gibbon, who follows him, are equally defective.2 Pliny's Letter surely implies, not that there was no law against the Christians in existence when he was writing; on the contrary, that there was, only that he had not been in the way of seeing it administered; and that, finding the number of persons who fell under it so great, he was staggered about his duty, and would not proceed without express authority from the Emperor himself. Certainly the expressions of Tertullian, whose writings indicate a familiar acquaintance with the laws of Rome, are clear upon this point. In his book, Ad Nationes (c. 7), he distinctly affirms that, "whilst all the other edicts of Nero had been repealed, that against the Christians alone remained in force;" and in his Apology (c. 5), he speaks of Trajan "having partly frustrated the effect of the laws against the Christians, by forbidding inquiries to be made after them." On the whole, therefore, there can be little doubt that the Christians could be legally put to death, as such, under Trajan. He mitigated the execution of the law, in some degree, it is true, but in a manner which only serves to show that the law itself was popular, and that he would rather expose himself to the charge of personal inconsistency in the mode of maintaining it, than risk the public reproach of abrogating it altogether. Certainly, nothing could be more incongruous, as Tertullian remarks, than to condemn the Christians, and yet forbid search to be made for them— which was what Trajan did; to pronounce them guilty by the sentence, and yet innocent by the prohibition. Nor, as it should seem, could anything be more futile 1 Mosheim, De Rebus Chris- 2 Mosheim, De Rebus Chrisp. 231. tian. p. 418.

tian.