Quadratus and Aristides writing in the reign of Hadrian, Justin Martyr and Athenagoras in the days of the Antonines. The calm, courageous dignity of the defence of Christianity now offered to the Government by men who put it forth at the risk of torture and death, is as striking as its intellectual vigour and rare moral enthusiasm. It never descends to cringing excuses, cowardly subterfuges, or angry retorts, although it is always prepared to drive the war of argument into the enemy's territory. Calm, open, frank, respectful, it reveals its authors as men who are certain that they can justify their position and confident of the future triumph of their cause, while they are quite ready to shed their own blood in the athletics of martyrdom.
Nowhere is the irony of history more manifest than in the fact that when the two best of the Roman emperors, Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius, were followed by one of the most worthless in the person of Commodus (a.d. 180–192), persecution was arrested and a season of prosperity hitherto unparalleled set in for the Christians. This idle, dissolute young man had not sufficient seriousness of purpose to persecute, and he seems to have taken a stupid pleasure in reversing his father's policy. At the same time, Marcia, his favourite mistress, was distinctly friendly to the Christians, among whom she appears to have been brought up in her humbler days; in particular she exerted herself to have the exiles recalled from Sicily. Now for the first time Christians were to be seen and recognised as such in the imperial court.
At this point the second period of activity and growth in the Church begins. With the exception of one short interval of persecution a long summer of prosperity had now set in. Commodus was succeeded by Septimius Severus (a.d. 193–211), a good emperor reigning well, and therefore a persecutor of the Christians. But his antagonism to the growing Church appears to have been provoked by the extravagances of those Puritans of the second century, the Montanists. There are two sides to
