at Christians persisting in their
profession shall be dealt with according to the law, is genuine. Mr. Long
seems inclined to try to throw doubt over the persecution at Lyons, by
pointing out that the letter of the Lyons Christians relating it alleges
it to have been attended by miraculous and incredible incidents. "A man,"
he says, "can only act consistently by accepting all this letter or
rejecting it all, and we cannot blame him for either." But it is contrary
to all experience to say that, because a fact is related with incorrect
additions, and embellishments, therefore it probably never happened at
all; or that it is not, in general, easy for an impartial mind to
distinguish between the fact and the embellishments. I cannot doubt that
the Lyons persecution took place, and that the punishment of Christians
for being Christians was sanctioned by Marcus Aurelius.

But then I must add that nine modern readers out of ten, when they read
this, will, I believe, have a perfectly false notion of what the moral
action of Marcus Aurelius, in sanctioning that punishment, really was.
They imagine Trajan, or Antoninus Pius, or Marcus Aurelius, fresh from the
perusal of the Gospel, fully aware of the spirit and holiness of the
Christian saints, ordering their extermination because he loved darkness
rather than light. Far from this, the Christianity which these emperors
aimed at repressing was, in their conception of it, something
philosophically contemptible, politically subversive, and morally
abominable. As men, they sincerely regarded it much as well-conditioned
people, with us, regard Mormonism; as rulers, they regarded it much as
Liberal statesmen, with us, regard the Jesuits. A kind of Mormonism,
constituted as a vast secret society, with obscure aims of political and
social subversion, was what Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius believed
themselves to be repressing when they punished Christians. The early
Christian apologists again and again declare to us under what odious
imputations the Christians lay, how general was the belief that these
imputations were well-grounded, how sincere was the horror which the
belief inspired. The multitude, convinced that the Christians were
atheists who ate human flesh and thought incest no crime, displayed
against them a fury so passionate as to embarrass and alarm their rulers.
The severe expressions of Tacitus--"_exitiabilis superstitio_"; "_odio
humani generis convicti_"--show how deep