Million Book Collection - The Fishers of Men Ministries

192 THE FIRST AGE OF THE MARTYR CHURCH.would amount to sacrilege and treason ;12 for theycould not acknowledge the Roman gods as gods,nor the emperor as Pontifex Maximus; nor couldthey swear by his genius, which was the oath expressingfidelity to the Roman constitution in itscivil and religious aspect. This was that " hatredof the human race," that is, in other words, of theRoman empire, of which in the eyes of Tacitus andPliny, of Nero now and of Trajan afterwards, theywere guilty as Christians. But the singular thingis this, that the Jew, who was the first to dragthem before the Roman tribunal, who was theiromnipresent, ever-ready antagonist and traducer,though he worshipped one only God, though heabhorred the whole Roman polytheism, though heswore not by the genius of the emperor, was exemptfrom punishment: his religion was recognisedby Roman law and the senate its interpreter,because it was the national and time-honoured re-ligion of a constituent part of the empire. On thesame ground the vilest Egyptian, Asiatic, Africanidol was allowed the worship of those who claimedit as their ancestral god. The Christian Faith wasthe sole exception to this universal tolerance, becauseit was not the religion of a subject nation,because it was new, because, in fine, it rested onprinciples which, if carried out, would sweep away12 Tertull. Apol. 10. " Sacrilegii et majestatis rei convenimur: summahsec causa, immo tota est." Lassaulx says, " die beiden Hauptanklagen,die Religion-verachtung, die Majestats-beleidigung." Fall des Hellenis-mus, p. 11.