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| Chapter V.
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Chapter V.
To say a word about the origin of laws of the kind to
which we now refer, there was an old decree that no god should be
consecrated by the emperor till first approved by the senate. Marcus
Æmilius had experience of this in reference to his god
Alburnus. And this, too, makes for our case, that among you
divinity is allotted at the judgment of human beings. Unless gods give
satisfaction to men, there will be no deification for them: the god
will have to propitiate the man. Tiberius82
accordingly, in
whose days the Christian name made its entry into the world, having
himself received intelligence from Palestine of events which had
clearly shown the truth of Christ’s divinity, brought the matter
before the senate, with his own decision in favour of Christ. The
senate, because it had not given the approval itself, rejected his
proposal. Cæsar held to his opinion, threatening wrath against all
accusers of the Christians. Consult your histories; you will there find
that Nero was the first who assailed with the imperial sword the
Christian sect, making progress then especially at Rome. But we
glory in having our condemnation hallowed by the hostility of such a
wretch. For any one who knows him, can understand that not except as
being of singular excellence did anything bring on it Nero’s
condemnation. Domitian, too, a man of Nero’s type in
cruelty, tried his hand at persecution; but as he had something of the
human in him, he soon put an end to what he had begun, even restoring
again those whom he had banished. Such as these have always been our
persecutors,—men unjust, impious, base, of whom even you
yourselves have no good to say, the sufferers under whose sentences you
have been wont to restore. But among so many princes from that time to
the present day, with anything of divine and human wisdom in them,
point out a single persecutor of the Christian name. So far from
that, we, on the contrary, bring before you one who was their
protector, as you will see by examining the letters of Marcus Aurelius,
that most grave of emperors, in which he bears his testimony that that
Germanic drought was removed by the rains obtained through the prayers
of the Christians who chanced to be fighting under him. And as he
did not by public law remove from Christians their legal disabilities,
yet in another way he put them openly aside, even adding a sentence of
condemnation, and that of greater severity, against their accusers.
What sort of laws are these which the impious alone execute against
us—and the unjust, the vile, the bloody, the senseless, the
insane? which Trajan to some extent made naught by forbidding
Christians to be sought after; which neither a Hadrian, though fond of
searching into all things strange and new, nor a Vespasian, though the
subjugator of the Jews, nor a Pius, nor a Verus, ever enforced? It
should surely be judged more natural for bad men to be eradicated by
good princes as being their natural enemies, than by those of a spirit
kindred with their own.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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