together in the truth, being kind and gentle toward each other, despising none. When it is in your power to do good, defer it not, for charity delivered from death. Be all of you subject one to another, having your conversation honest among the Gentiles; that by your good works both ye yourselves may receive praise and the Lord may not be blasphemed through you. But woe be to him by whom the name of the Lord is blasphemed. Therefore teach all men sobriety; in which do ye also exercise yourselves.

I am greatly afflicted for Valens, who was once a presbyter among you; that he should so little understand the place that was given to him in the Church. Wherefore I admonish you that ye abstain from covetousness, and that ye be chaste, and true of speech. Keep yourselves from all evil; for he that in these things cannot govern himself, how shall he be able to prescribe them to another? If a man does not keep himself from covetousness he shall be polluted with idolatry and be judged as if he were a Gentile. But who of you are ignorant of the judgment of God? Do we not know that the saints shall judge the world, as Paul teaches? But I have neither perceived nor heard anything of this kind in you, among whom the blessed Paul labored, and who are named in the beginning of his epistle. For he glories of you in all the churches who then only knew God; for we did not then know him. Wherefore, my brethren, I am exceedingly sorry both for him and for his wife; to whom God grant a true repentance.

And be ye also moderate upon this occasion, and look not upon such as enemies, but call them back as suffering and erring members, that ye may save your whole body; for by so doing ye shall edify your own selves. For I trust that ye are well exercised in the Holy Scriptures, and that nothing is hid from you; but at present it is not granted unto me to practise that which is written, Be angry and sin not; and again, Let not the sun go down upon your wrath. Blessed be he that believeth and remembereth these things, which also I trust you do.

Now the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, and he himself who is our everlasting high-priest, the Son of God, even Jesus Christ, build you up in faith and in truth and in all

meekness and lenity; in patience and long-suffering, in forbearance and chastity. And grant unto you a lot and portion among his saints; and us with you, and to all that are under the heavens, who shall believe in our Lord Jesus Christ, and in his Father who raised him from the dead. Pray for all the saints; pray also for kings, and all that are in authority; and for those who persecute you, and hate you, and for the enemies of the cross; that your fruit may be manifest in all, and that ye may be perfect in Christ. Ye wrote to me, both ye and also Ignatius, that if anyone went from hence into Syria he should bring your letters with him, which also I will take care of, as soon as I shall have a convenient opportunity, either by myself or him whom I shall send upon your account. The Epistles of Ignatius, which he wrote unto us, together with what others of his have come to our hands, we have sent to you, according to your order, which are subjoined to this epistle. By which we may be greatly profited; for they treat of faith and patience, and of all things that pertain to edification in the Lord Jesus. What you know certainly of Ignatius and those that are with him signify to us.

These things have I written unto you by Crescens, whom by this present epistle I have recommended to you, and do now again commend. For he has had his conversation without blame among us, and I suppose also with you. Ye will also have regard unto his sister when she shall come unto you. Be ye safe in the Lord Jesus Christ, and in favor with all yours. Amen.

PERSECUTION OF THE CHRISTIANS IN GAUL

A.D. 177

FRANÇOIS P. G. GUIZOT

That the persecutions of Christians under the Roman Empire should have been inaugurated by a Nero is not a subject of wonder in view of that Emperor's character as depicted in history through all ages since his own. But it is difficult to understand how an emperor like Trajan-an enlightened and humane ruler-if he was powerless to prevent, could have brought himself to give countenance to a policy at once so intolerant and cruel, and in the end to prove so short-sighted. A great cause prospers by persecution. The martyr-spirit is strengthened by blows and fagots. History has well proved the truth of that saying of the Church Fathers, tersely given by St. Jerome: Est sanguis martyrium seminarium Ecclesiarum (“The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church ”).

Still more incomprehensible to modern students is the fact that Marcus Aurelius, the imperial philosopher and benevolent man, should also be stained with the infamy of the persecutions. The charges brought against him as a cruel persecutor of the Christians have given rise to much dispute among historical scholars. Among modern Christian writers of favorable disposition toward Marcus, F. W. Farrar has perhaps as clearly as any set forth the views that explain his conduct and vindicate his reputation for humanity: "That he shared the profound dislike with which Christians were regarded is very probable. That he was a coldblooded and virulent persecutor is utterly unlike his whole character. The deep calamities in which during his whole reign the empire was involved caused widespread distress, and roused into peculiar fury the feelings of the provincials against men whose atheism (for such they considered it to be) had kindled the anger of the gods. Marcus, when appealed to, simply let the existing law take its course." In like manner the purely official or legal view of human affairs often leads the most kindly and conscientious of men to pursue or acquiesce in policies against which, in different situations, their moral nature would rebel.

There were many reasons which led the populace to hate Christians, whom, first of all, they regarded as being unpatriotic. While among Romans it was considered the highest honor to possess the privileges of Roman citizenship, the Christians announced that they were citizens of heaven. They shrank from public office and military service.

Again, the ancient religion of Rome was an adjunct of state dignity and ceremonial. It was hallowed by a thousand traditional and patriotic associations. The Christians regarded its rites and its popular assem

blies with contempt and abhorrence. The Romans viewed the secret meetings of the Christians with suspicion, and accused them of abominable excesses and crime. They were known to have representatives in every important city of Gaul, Spain, Italy, and Asia; and the more their communities grew, the more the Roman populace raged against them. Only such considerations appear to mitigate the historical judgments against Aurelius for marring the splendor of his reign by persecutions. The tragedies enacted in the churches of Lyons and Vienne, as described in the following pages, form one of the most melancholy records of history.

WHEN

/HEN Christianity began to penetrate into Gaul, it encountered there two religions very different one from the other, and infinitely more different from the Christian religion; these were Druidism and paganism-hostile one to the other, but with a hostility political only, and unconnected with those really religious questions that Christianity was coming to raise.

Druidism, considered as a religion, was a mass of confusion, wherein the instinctive notions of the human race concerning the origin and destiny of the world and of mankind were mingled with the oriental dreams of metempsychosis—that pretended transmigration, at successive periods, of immortal souls into divers creatures. This confusion was worse confounded by traditions borrowed from the mythologies of the East and the North, by shadowy remnants of a symbolical worship paid to the material forces of nature, and by barbaric practices, such as human sacrifices, in honor of the gods or of the dead.

People who are without the scientific development of language and the art of writing do not attain to systematic and productive religious creeds. There is nothing to show that, from the first appearance of the Gauls in history to their struggle with victorious Rome, the religious influence of Druidism had caused any notable progress to be made in Gallic manners and civilization. A general and strong, but vague and incoherent, belief in the immortality of the soul was its noblest characteristic. But with the religious elements, at the same time coarse and mystical, were united two facts of importance: the Druids formed a veritable ecclesiastical corporation, which had, throughout Gallic society, fixed attributes, special manners and customs, an existence at the same time

distinct and national; and in the wars with Rome this corpora tion became the most faithful representatives and the most persistent defenders of Gallic independence and nationality.

The Druids were far more a clergy than Druidism was a religion; but it was an organized and a patriotic clergy. It was especially on this account that they exercised in Gaul an influence which was still existent, particularly in Northwestern Gaul, at the time when Christianity reached the Gallic provinces of the South and Centre.

The Græco-Roman paganism was, at this time, far more powerful than Druidism in Gaul, and yet more lukewarm and destitute of all religious vitality. It was the religion of the conquerors and of the State, and was invested, in that quality, with real power; but, beyond that, it had but the power derived from popular customs and superstitions. As a religious creed, the Latin paganism was at bottom empty, indifferent, and inclined to tolerate all religions in the State, provided only that they, in their turn, were indifferent at any rate toward itself, and that they did not come troubling the State, either by disobeying her rulers or by attacking her old deities, dead and buried beneath their own still standing altars.

Such were the two religions with which in Gaul nascent Christianity had to contend. Compared with them it was, to all appearance, very small and very weak; but it was provided with the most efficient weapons for fighting and beating them, for it had exactly the moral forces which they lacked. Christianity, instead of being, like Druidism, a religion exclusively national and hostile to all that was foreign, proclaimed a universal religion, free from all local and national partiality, addressing itself to all men in the name of the same God, and offering to all the same salvation. It is one of the strangest and most significant facts in history that the religion most universally human, most dissociated from every consideration but that of the rights and well-being of the human race in its entirety that such a religion, be it repeated, should have come forth from the womb of the most exclusive, most rigorously and obstinately national religion that ever appeared in the world, that is, Judaism. Such, nevertheless, was the birth of Christianity; and this wonderful contrast between the essence