ly the prejudices of the multitude
imbued the educated class also. One asks one's self with astonishment how
a doctrine so benign as that of Christ can have incurred misrepresentation
so monstrous. The inner and moving cause of the misrepresentation lay, no
doubt, in this--that Christianity was a new spirit in the Roman world,
destined to act in that world as its dissolvent; and it was inevitable
that Christianity in the Roman world, like democracy in the modern world,
like every new spirit with a similar mission assigned to it, should at its
first appearance occasion an instinctive shrinking and repugnance in the
world which it was to dissolve. The outer and palpable causes of the
misrepresentation were, for the Roman public at large, the confounding of
the Christians with the Jews, that isolated, fierce, and stubborn race,
whose stubbornness, fierceness, and isolation, real as they were, the
fancy of a civilized Roman yet further exaggerated; the atmosphere of
mystery and novelty which surrounded the Christian rites; the very
simplicity of Christian theism; for the Roman statesman, the character of
secret assemblages which the meetings of the Christian community wore,
under a State-system as jealous of unauthorized associations as the Code
Napoleon.

A Roman of Marcus Aurelius's time and position could not well see the
Christians except through the mist of these prejudices. Seen through such
a mist, the Christians appeared with a thousand faults not their own; but
it has not been sufficiently remarked that faults really their own many of
them assuredly appeared with, besides--faults especially likely to strike
such an observer as Marcus Aurelius, and to confirm him in the prejudices
of his race, station, and rearing. We look back upon Christianity after
it has proved what a future it bore within it, and for us the sole
representatives of its early struggles are the pure and devoted spirits
through whom it proved this; Marcus Aurelius saw it with its future yet
unshown, and with the tares among its professed progeny not less
conspicuous than the wheat. Who can doubt that, among the professing
Christians of the second century, as among the professing Christians of
the nineteenth, there was plenty of folly, plenty of rabid nonsense,
plenty of gross fanaticism? Who will even venture to affirm that,
separated in great measure from the intellect and civilization of the
world for one or two centuries, Christianity, wonderful