people would drive them to
persecution, even if they were unwilling. But besides the fact of the
Christians rejecting all the heathen ceremonies, we must not forget that
they plainly maintain that all the heathen religions were false. The
Christians thus declared war against the heathen rites, and it is hardly
necessary to observe that this was a declaration of hostility against
the Roman government, which tolerated all the various forms of
superstition that existed in the empire, and could not consistently
tolerate another religion, which declared that all the rest were false
and all the splendid ceremonies of the empire only a worship of devils.

[A] Eusebius, iv. 26; and Routh's Reliquiae Sacrae, vol. I, and
the notes. The interpretation of this Fragment is not easy.
Mosheim misunderstood one passage so far as to affirm that
Marcus promised rewards to those who denounced the Christians;
an interpretation which is entirely false. Melito calls the
Christian religion "our philosophy," which began among
barbarians (the Jews), and flourished among the Roman subjects
in the time of Augustus, to the great advantage of the empire,
for from that time the power of the Romans grew great and
glorious. He says that the emperor has and will have as the
successor to Augustus' power the good wishes of men, if he will
protect that philosophy which grew up with the empire and began
with Augustus, which philosophy the predecessors of Antoninus
honored in addition to the other religions. He further says
that the Christian religion had suffered no harm since the time
of Augustus, but on the contrary had enjoyed all honor and
respect that any man could desire. Nero and Domitian, he says,
were alone persuaded by some malicious men to calumniate the
Christian religion, and this was the origin of the false
charges against the Christians. But this was corrected by the
emperors who immediately preceded Antoninus, who often by their
rescripts reproved those who attempted to trouble the
Christians. Hadrian, Antoninus' grandfather, wrote to many, and
among them to Fundanus, the governor of Asia. Antoninus Pius,
when Marcus was associated with him in the empire, wrote to the
cities that they must not trouble the Christians; among others,
to the people of Larissa, Thessalonica, the Athenians, and all
the Greeks. Melito concluded thus: "