measures against the troublesome Messianists, several of whom served short terms of imprisonment. That a street riot should end in a Greek saint (Stephen) being stoned to death by a mob need surprise no reader of the turbulent pages of Josephus. Two fresh disturbing factors affected the course of the new faith. In Samaria the Messianic preachers met with Gnostic rivalry; and the credulous Samaritans hardly knew whether to follow the eloquent Simon Magus or the persuasions of John and Cephas. From Damascus came Paul. Only for a fortnight could Paul endure the conversation of Cephas and James the ascetic. With the Saints of Jerusalem he henceforward declared war. They clung to the beggarly elements of the Law and the Temple. Paul shook off the dust of his feet as he left a city where the gospel of the Law of the Spirit of Life was completely misunderstood. He allowed but one link to remain between him and the Jewish Christians of Jerusalem; he promised, and he kept his promise, to collect alms for their poor. Even the book of Acts reveals the acrid dissension which took place between the Ebionite group in Jerusalem and the broader-minded school of Antioch, and it records the singular fact that, not at Jerusalem, but at Antioch, the name of Christians first gained currency. Antioch rejected circumcision, and without scruple permitted sacrificial meat from pagan temples to be laid upon Christian tables. Jerusalem struggled hard to fence out of the new movement the Pauline doctrine of freedom. James even carried hostilities into Paul's own camp at Antioch, where a lively altercation occurred, which Paul has reported in his letter to the Galatians. Year after year, as Paul travelled toilfully from city to city in Asia Minor and Europe, he was pursued, according to "Acts," by malevolent Jews, who had no connection with the New People. But his own account gives a different turn altogether to this race for religious supremacy. His enemies were the Jerusalem section of the New People. His feeling towards the Ebionite Christians who followed him everywhere and undid his teaching can be gauged from such expressions as "false apostles of Christ," "deceitful workers," "false brethren," "I reckon that I am not a whit behind the very chiefest apostles," "some indeed preach Christ even of envy and strife," etc.

n

But over all parties of the New Movement the shadow of evil days and persecution descended. James the Just, rigid advocate of the Law, suffered death at the order of Ananus the High priest. A year or two later Paul, the opponent of Hebrew ceremonial, died among Nero's victims in Rome. The Messianic sect, whose manifesto may be read in the Apocalypse, lamented the fate of faithful Antipas, and cried damnation upon cruel Rome. Huddling together in the town of Pella, the Christians who had fled from the besieged city of Jerusalem waited for the great catastrophe. When, in 70, the Holy City fell, Judaism had no longer a central heart and brain to direct or control the New Christian Movement.

11. From the Fall of Jerusalem to the Death of the Emperor Hadrian, 138 C.E.—A coin of Titus bore the melancholy design of "Judæa capta"-a woman sitting disconsolate under a palm-tree. A noble arch reminded the Romans of the exploits of Titus in the subjugation of the Jews. Tranquillity for a time brooded over the Empire. Vespasian shut the temple of Janus, built a temple to Peace, economised the Imperial finances, gratified the people with splendid baths, and commenced the building of the huge Colosseum, whose serried tiers were to accommodate 87,000 spectators. Titus succeeded (79-81 C.E.). The Delight of the Human Race," as Suetonius named Titus, was followed by Domitian (81-96). Meanwhile, the headquarters of Jewish ecclesiastical life had been established in Jamnia or Jabne, a town on the coast of Palestine. With the ruin of the Temple had vanished the system of sacrifice. The power of the Sadducees had departed. Henceforward Pharisaism ruled the Jewish heart. The Sanhedrim existed no longer. At Jamnia there dwelt a group of Rabbis, who gave their whole energy and ingenuity to the slow compilation of sacred traditions. On religious and social questions all Jews obeyed the decisions of the Rabbis of Jamnia; and to these revered fathers the people of the Diaspora still rendered, by the hands of "apostles," the tribute which had formerly been devoted to the Temple. With very

different feelings did the wretched Jews of Rome pay an enforced tax to the officers of the emperor Domitian. Into the squalid slums of Rome many Jews had crowded, and

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were happy if they could but secure beds of straw. Roman nobles, Flavius Clemens and Acilius Glabrio, suffered death for adopting the creed of the despised Hebrews. In after years legend magnified this incident into a wholesale persecution of Christians. With Judaism other religions still competed for the favour of the Romans. Serapis was adored, and Isis was hailed as Queen of Egypt and Goddess of the East. The emperor himself claimed the divine Juno as his mother, and an official document named him "Our Lord and God." Vicious in private life, Domitian aimed at public reforms, purifying the magistracy, overlooking the morals of actors, forbidding the mutilation of slaves into eunuchs, and burying alive a Vestal virgin accused of unchastity. But while poets and orators strove for the gilded oak-leaf crowns on the Capitoline hill, grosser forms of recreation gained increased vogue, and, in the amphitheatre, gladiators fought, wild beasts rent their victims, chariots raced, and mimic sea-fights excited the applause of the citizens. Many honourable senators, Stoics in religion and practice, fell by the sword. The emperor was stabbed to death in 96.

To the mild Nerva succeeded, in 98, the admirable Trajan. A lofty column at Rome recorded his campaigns beyond the Danube. The profuse charity of the Imperial Government not only gave corn to the poor, but supplied food for 300,000 children throughout the Italian peninsula. A certain splendour, for good and for evil, marked the times-proud conquests, lavish expenditure, a large and careless dissoluteness among soldiery and people at the table, the bath, and the circus, magnificence of style and furniture in the villas of the wealthy, an easy contempt for the fates which made suicide fashionable among both women and men, a fine polish and intellectual elegance among the educated. Great writers flourished; and the younger Pliny corresponded in familiar letters with the emperor.

In Pliny's correspondence with Trajan a letter occurs* relating to the Christians, which is either genuine, or so temperate a forgery that we may readily accept it as a picture of the new sect in Asia Minor. Assuming its

* Book x., 96, 97. The letters are translated by J. D. Lewis.

genuineness, we find that about 112 Pliny, as governor of Bithynia, described to the emperor how a wave of the new religion had passed over the people, pagan temples had been for a time deserted, sacrifices almost ceased, and a number of the enthusiasts had been executed by Pliny's orders. Having had no previous experience with Christians, and there being no positive law against the Christian Way, he applied to Trajan for direction. He felt hesitation " as to whether any distinction of age should be made, or persons, however tender in years, should be viewed as differing in no respect from the full-grown; whether pardon should be accorded to repentance, or he who had once been a Christian should gain nothing by having ceased to be one; whether the very profession itself, if unattended by crime, or else the crimes necessarily attaching to the profession, should be made the subject of punishment." He had brought to trial a number of suspects on the strength of a list in an anonymous paper. Some of them cleared themselves by offering wine and incense before the imperial statue. Others pleaded they had formerly followed the Christian teaching ("more than one of them as much as twenty years before"), but had now forsaken it. "All these,

too, not only honoured your image and the effigies of the gods, but also reviled Christ." To Pliny's inquiries as to the order of the assemblies which the Christians held, they explained that "they had been in the habit of meeting together on a stated day, before sunrise, and of offering in turns a form of invocation to Christ, as to a god; also of binding themselves by an oath, not for any guilty purpose, but not to commit thefts, or robberies, or adulteries, not to break their word, not to repudiate deposits when called upon; these ceremonies having been gone through, they had been in the habit of separating, and again meeting together for the purpose of taking food-food, that is, of an ordinary and innocent kind. They had, however, ceased from doing even this, after my edict, in which, following your orders" [Trajan had suppressed workmen's clubs and guilds in Rome], "I had forbidden the existence of Fraternities. This made me think it all the more necessary to inquire, even by torture, of two maid-servants, who were styled deaconesses, what the truth was. I could discover nothing else than a vicious and extravagant superstition;

consequently, having adjourned the inquiry, I have had recourse to your counsels." Trajan's answer approved Pliny's caution, ordered the punishment of persistent Christians and the pardon of those who complied with the rites of the official religion, and deprecated any reliance on anonymous charges.*

Trajan, on his way to subdue Armenia, paused at Antioch, where he narrowly escaped death during the earthquake that shook the city to ruins (115). Whether the Christian leader, Ignatius, suffered martyrdom at this period, and in consequence of the excitement raised by the terrors of the earthquake, must be left an open question. Tradition represented Ignatius as condemned to an encounter with wild beasts, as journeying to Rome in the charge of a Roman guard, and as writing epistles to Christian churches while on the road to doom. Trajan had pushed eastwards, and touched the Persian Gulf, when tidings reached him of a great revolt among the teeming Hebrew colonies in Egypt and the neighbouring Cyrene. The fanatical fire spread to Cyprus and Mesopotamia. Vast numbers of Gentiles perished. Mad hatred, the fruit of long insult and oppression, changed the Jews into cannibals. The Jews gnawed the flesh of the dead, and smeared themselves with blood. Vengeance overwhelmed them. Trajan's armies suppressed the rebellion. Henceforward, no Jew might land in Cyprus ; if shipwrecked there, he was put to death.

The active Hadrian, who succeeded Trajan in 117, journeyed year after year from one point of the empire to another-Britain, Spain, North Africa, Parthia, Athens, Carthage, and Alexandria. Athens held a place of high honour. Multitudes of students crowded to hear the philosophic lectures of the Sophists. Alexandria also drew hosts of intellectual youth to its Museum, its colleges, its Ptolemæan library. Here Hadrian took delight in conversations with the priests and theorists in whose speculations mingled the religious ideas of the East and the West. When he had ascended the Nile and visited the ruins of Thebes, he turned to Syria, and directed that Jerusalem should be rebuilt under the name of Elia Capitolina. At this time an imperial edict against human mutilation, and therefore

* See also Ramsay's "Church in the Roman Empire," chapter x.