nt reproach cast on Christians as
credulous, weak-minded, and poor-spirited. The heathen objectors in
Minucius and Lactantius speak of their "old-woman's tales." Celsus
accuses them of "assenting at random and without reason," saying, "Do
not inquire, but believe." "They lay it down," he says elsewhere: "Let
no educated man approach, no man of wisdom, no man of sense; but if a
man be unlearned, weak in intellect, an infant, let him come with
confidence. Confessing that these are worthy of their God, they
evidently desire, as they are able, to convert none but fools, and
vulgar, and stupid, and slavish, women and boys." They "take in the
simple and lead him where they will." They address themselves to
"youths, house-servants, and the weak in intellect." They "hurry away
from the educated, as not fit subjects of their imposition, and inveigle
the rustic." "Thou," says the heathen magistrate to the martyr
Fructuosus, "who as a teacher dost disseminate a new fable, that fickle
girls may desert the groves and abandon Jupiter, condemn, if thou art
wise, the anile creed."

Hence the epithets of itinerant, mountebank, conjurer, cheat, sophist,
and sorcerer, heaped upon the teachers of Christianity; sometimes to
account for the report or apparent truth of their miracles, sometimes to
explain their success. Our Lord was said to have learned his miraculous
power in Egypt; "wizard, mediciner, cheat, rogue, conjurer," were the
epithets applied to him by the opponents of Eusebius; they "worship that
crucified sophist," says Lucian; "Paul, who surpasses all the conjurers
and impostors who ever lived," is Julian's account of the apostle. "You
have sent through the whole world," says St. Justin to Trypho, "to
preach that a certain atheistic and lawless sect has sprung from one
Jesus, a Galilean cheat." "We know," says Lucian, speaking of Chaldaeans
and magicians, "the Syrian from Palestine, who is the sophist in these
matters, how many lunatics, with eyes distorted and mouth in foam, he
raises and sends away restored, ridding them from the evil at a great
price." "If any conjurer came to them, a man of skill and knowing how to
manage matters," says the same writer, "he made money in no time, with a
broad grin at the simple fellows." The officer who had custody of St.
Perpetua feared her escape from prison "by magical incantations." When
St. Tiburtius had walked barefoot on hot coals, his judge cried out
that Christ had taught him magic.