crimes in large cities throughout the empire, conflagrations in Rome, robberies, incest, foul murders of men, women, and children for sacrificial purposes were charged against those inhuman Christians who consorted with slaves and with criminals of the most abject and depraved kind, belonging to the Spartacus group, full of sedition and treason, conspiring for the overthrow of the Roman government, and undermining the most sacred foundations of human life.
The writers of the day could not find words abusive enough to express the villainy and depravity of those Christian vipers who breathe poison and hatred for the human race, those Christian deniers of Gods and of all things divine, those cannibal atheists who delighted in the seduction of poor, ignorant, misguided slaves, those Christians who entertained the absurd superstitions of that degraded and debased, and abject race, the Jews, the Gypsies of the Roman world, those Christians who delighted in the desecration of all that is true, good, and beautiful, who enjoyed the profanation of all that is pure and holy in man. Christianity was a plague which threatened with infection the body-politic and with pollution the very sources of society, a fatal scourge that surely tended towards dissolution of all ties, sacred to family, society, and humanity. Christians were moral lepers. No punishment, no torture was adequate for such fiends in human shape. Such were the terrible charges brought against the Christians, accusations circulated among the populace by writers, by reliable witnesses, government agents, informers, professional spies and detectives, and by respectable citizens. The Christians were "the enemies of the human race," the sworn foes of all law and order, and as such, they were hunted by police, by the populace, they were mobbed, jailed, deported, impaled, crucified, thrown to wild beasts on the arena, or hanged as flaming torches in the public parks or in Caesar's gardens for the amusement of the people. Even the imperial, ethical philosopher, Marcus Aurelius, joined in the hunting down of "the superstitious" and dangerous Christians.
Pliny's assurance that the spread of Christianity could be stayed was not realized. Christianity could not be stayed by the force of edict and persecution. Christ and his small band of disciples triumphed; lowly and ignorant as they appeared to the haughty Roman patricians, mean as the Christians appeared to the aristocratic Sadducees and the learned doctors of the law, because Christianity originated among the poor and the lowly, the slaves and day-laborers, carpenters and fishermen, still it was just these few individuals who really constituted the ad-
