The rapid conquest of the western world by the Church is sometimes used as proof definite that the Christian ideas must have been of divine origin. It is not my business to debate this point, but I would suggest that the villainous conditions under which the majority of the Romans were forced to live had as much to do with the success of the earliest missionaries as the sound common sense of their message.

Thus far I have shown you one side of the Roman picture—the world of the soldiers and statesmen and rich manufacturers and scientists, fortunate folks who lived in delightful and enlightened ease on the slopes of the Lateran Hill or among the valleys and hills of the Campania or somewhere along the bay of Naples.

But they were only part of the story.

Amid the teeming slums of the suburbs there was little enough evidence of that plentiful prosperity which made the poets rave about the millennium and inspired orators to compare Octavian to Jupiter.

There, in the endless and dreary rows of overcrowded and reeking tenement houses, lived those vast multitudes to whom life was merely an uninterrupted sensation of hunger, sweat, and pain. To those men and women the wonderful tale of a simple carpenter in a little village beyond the sea who had gained his daily bread by the labour of his own hands, who had loved the poor and downtrodden, and who therefore had been killed by his cruel and rapacious enemies, meant something very real and tangible. Yes, they had all of them heard of Mithras and Isis and Astarte. But these gods were dead; they had died hundreds and thousands of years ago and what people knew about them they only knew by hearsay from other people who had also died hundreds and thousands of years ago.

Joshua of Nazareth, on the other hand, the Christ,"the Anointed," as the Greek missionaries called him,had been on this earth only a short time ago. Many a man then alive might have known him, might have listened to him, if by chance he had visited southern Syria during the reign of the Emperor Tiberius.

And there were others, the baker on the corner, the fruit peddler from the next street, who in a little dark garden on the Appian Way had spoken with a certain Peter, a fisherman from the village of Capernaum,who had actually been near the mountain of Golgotha on that terrible afternoon when the Prophet had been nailed to the cross by the soldiers of the Roman governor.

We should remember this when we try to understand the sudden popular appeal of this new faith.

It was that personal touch, that direct and personal feeling of intimacy and near-by-ness which gave Christianity such a tremendous advantage over all other creeds. That and the love which Jesus had so incessantly expressed for the submerged and the disinherited among all nations radiated from everything he had said. Whether he had put it into the exact terms used by his followers was of very slight importance. The slaves had ears to hear and they understood. And trembling before the high promise of a glorious future, they for the first time in their lives beheld the rays of a new hope.

At last the words had been spoken that were to set them free.

No longer were they poor and despised, an evil thing in the sight of the great of this world.

On the contrary, they were the predilected children of a loving Father.

They were to inherit the earth and the fullness thereof.

They were to partake of joys withheld from many of those proud masters who even then dwelled behind the high walls of their Samnian villas.

For that constituted the strength of the new faith.Christianity was the first concrete religious system which gave the average man a chance.

Of course I am now talking of Christianity as an experience of the soul—as a mode of living and thinking—and I have tried to explain how, in a world full of the dry-rot of slavery, the good tidings must spread with the speed and fury of an emotional prairie fire. But history, except upon rare occasions, does not concern itself with the spiritual adventures of private citizens, be they free or in bondage. When these humble creatures have been neatly organized into nations, guilds, churches, armies, brotherhoods, and federations; when they have begun to obey a single directing head; when they have accumulated sufficient wealth to pay taxes and can be forced into armies for the purpose of national conquest, then at last they begin to attract the attention of our chroniclers and are given serious attention. Hence we know a great deal about the early Church, but exceedingly little about the people who were the true founders of that institution.That is rather a pity, for the early development of Christianity is one of the most interesting episodes in all history.

The Church which finally was built upon the ruins of the ancient empire was really a combination of two conflicting interests. On the one side it stood forth as the champion of those all-embracing ideals of love and charity which the Master himself had taught, but on the other side it found itself ineradicably bound up with that arid spirit of provincialism which since the beginning of time had set the compatriots of Jesus apart from the rest of the world.

In plain language, it combined Roman efficiency with Judaean intolerance, and as a result it established a reign of terror over the minds of men which was as efficient as it was illogical.

To understand how this could have happened, we must go back once more to the days of Paul and to the first fifty years after the death of Christ, and we mus firmly grasp the fact that Christianity had begun as a reform movement within the bosom of the Jewish church and had been a purely nationalistic movement which in the beginning had threatened the rulers of the Jewish state and no one else.

The Pharisees who had happened to be in power when Jesus lived had understood this only too clearly. Quite naturally they had feared the ultimate consequences of an agitation which boldly threatened to question a spiritual monopoly winch was based upon nothing more substantial than brute force. To save themselves from being wiped out they had been forced to act in a spirit of panic and had sent their enemy to the gallows before the Roman authorities had had time to intervene and deprive them of their victim.

What Jesus would have done had he lived it is impossible to say. He was killed long before he was able to organize his disciples into a special sect, nor did he leave a single word of writing from which his followers could conclude what he wanted them to do.

In the end, however, this had proved to be a blessing in disguise.

The absence of a written set of rules, of a definite collection of ordinances and regulations had left the disciples free to follow the spirit of their master's words rather than the letter of his law. Had they been bound by a book, they would very likely have devoted all their energies to a theological discussion upon the ever-enticing subject of commas and semicolons.

In that case, of course, no one outside of a few professional scholars could have possibly shown the slightest interest in the new faith, and Christianity would have gone the way of so many other sects which begin with elaborate, written programmes and end when the police are called upon to throw the haggling theologians into the street.

At the distance of almost twenty centuries, when we realize what tremendous damage Christianity did to the Roman Empire, it is a matter of surprise that the authorities took practically no steps to quell a movement which was fully as dangerous to the safety of the State as an invasion by Huns or Goths. They knew, of course, that the fate of this eastern prophet had caused great excitement among their house slaves,that the women were for ever telling each other about the imminent reappearance of the King of Heaven, and that quite a number of old men had solemnly predicted the impending destruction of this world by a ball of fire.

But it was not the first time that the poorer classes had gone into hysterics about some new religious hero. Most likely it would not be the last time, either.Meanwhile the police would see to it that these poor,frenzied fanatics did not disturb the peace of the realm.

And that was that.

The police did watch out, but found little occasion to act. The followers of the new mystery went about their business in a most exemplary fashion. They did not try to overthrow the government. At first, several slaves had expected that the common fatherhood of God and the common brotherhood of man would imply a cessation of the old relation between master and servant. The apostle Paul, however, had hastened to explain that the kingdom of which he spoke was an invisible and intangible kingdom of the soul and that people on this earth had better take things as they found them, in expectation of the final reward which awaited them in Heaven.

Similarly, a good many wives, chafing at the bondage of matrimony as established by the harsh laws of Home, had rushed to the conclusion that Christianity was synonymous with emancipation and full equality of rights between men and women.But again Paul had stepped forward and in a number of tactful letters had implored his beloved sisters to refrain from all those extremes which would make their Church suspect in the eyes of the more conservative pagans, and had persuaded them to continue in that slate of semi-slavery which had been woman's share ever since Adam and Eve had been driven out of Paradise. All this showed a most commendable respect for the law, and as far as the authorities were concerned the Christian missionaries could therefore come and go at will and preach as best suited their own individual tastes and preferences.

But as has happened so often in history the masses had shown themselves less tolerant than their rulers.Just because people are poor it does not necessarily follow that they are high-minded citizens who could be prosperous and happy if their conscience would only permit them to make those compromises which are held to be necessary for the accumulation of wealth.

And the Roman proletariat, for centuries debauched by free meals and free prize-fights, was no exception to this rule. At first it derived a great deal of rough pleasure from those sober-faced groups of men and women who with rapt attention listened to the weird stories about a God who had ignominiously died on a cross, like any other common criminal, and who made it their business to utter loud prayers for the roughs who pelted their gatherings with stones and dirt.

The Roman priests, however, were not able to take such a detached view of this new development.

The religion of the Empire was a state religion.It consisted of certain solemn sacrifices made upon certain specified occasions and paid for in cash. This money went toward the support of the church officers.When thousands of people began to desert the old shrines and went to another Church which did not charge them anything at all, the priests were faced by a very serious reduction in their salary. This, of course, did not please them at all, and soon they were loud in their abuse of the godless heretics who turned their backs upon the gods of their fathers and burned incense to the memory of a foreign prophet.

But there was another class of people in the city who had even better reason to hate the Christians.Those were the fakirs, who as Indian yogis and poonghees and hierophants of the great and only mysteries of Isis and Ishtar and Baal and Cybele and Attis had for years made a fat and easy living at the expense of the credulous Roman middle classes. If the Christians had set up a rival establishment and had charged a handsome price for their own particular revelations, the guild of spook-doctors and palmists and necromancers would have had no reason for complaint. Business was business, and the soothsaying fraternity did not mind if a bit of their trade went elsewhere. But these Christians—a plague upon their silly notions!—refused to take any reward. Yea, they even gave away what they had, fed the hungry and shared their own roof with the homeless. And all that for nothing! Surely that was going too far and they never could have done this unless they were possessed of certain hidden sources of revenue, the origin of which no one thus far had been able to discover.

Rome by this time was no longer a city of freeborn burghers. It was the temporary dwelling place of hundreds of thousands of disinherited peasants from all parts of the Empire. Such a mob, obeying the mysterious laws that rule the behaviour of crowds,is always ready to hate those who behave differently from themselves and to suspect those who for no apparent reason prefer to live a life of decency and restraint. The hail-fellow-well-met who will take a drink and (occasionally) will pay for one is a fine neighbour and a good fellow. But the man who holds himself aloof and refuses to go to the wild-animal show in the Coliseum, who does not cheer when batches of prisoners of war are being dragged through the streets of the Capitoline Hill, is a spoil-sport and an enemy of the community at large.

When in the year 64 a great conflagration destroyed that part of Rome inhabited by the poorer classes, the scene was set for the first organized attacks upon the Christians.

At first it was rumoured that the Emperor Nero, in a fit of drunken, conceit, had ordered his capital to be set on fire that he might get rid of the slums and rebuild the city according to his own plans. The crowd,however, knew better. It was the fault of those Jews and Christians who were for ever telling each other about the happy day when large balls of fire would descend from Heaven and the homes of the wicked would go up in flames.

Once this story had been successfully started, others followed in rapid succession. One old woman had heard the Christians talk with the dead. Another knew that they stole little children and cut their throats and smeared their blood upon the altar of their outlandish god. Of course, no one had ever been able to detect them at any of these scandalous practices, but that was only because they were so terribly clever and had bribed the police. But now at last they had been caught red-handed and they would be made to suffer for their vile deeds.

Of the number of faithful who were lynched upon this occasion we know nothing. Paul and Peter, so it seems, were among the victims, for thereafter their names are never heard again.

That this terrible outbreak of popular folly accomplished nothing it is needless to state. The noble dignity with which the martyrs accepted their fate was the best possible propaganda for the new ideas, and for every Christian who perished there were a dozen pagans ready and eager to take his place. As soon as Nero had committed the only decent act of his short and useless life (he killed himself in the year 68), the Christians returned to their old haunts and everything was as it had been before.

By this time the Roman authorities were making a great discovery. They began to suspect that a Christian was not exactly the same thing as a Jew.

We can hardly blame them for having committed this error. The historical researches of the last hundred years have made it increasingly clear that the Synagogue was the clearing-house through which the new faith was passed on to the rest of the world.

Remember that Jesus himself was a Jew and that he had always been most careful in observing the ancient laws of his fathers and that he had addressed himself almost exclusively to Jewish audiences. Once,and then only for a short time, had he left his native country, but the task which he had set himself he had accomplished with and by and for his fellow-Jews.Nor was there anything in what he had ever said which could have given the average Roman the impression that there was a deliberate difference between Christianity and Judaism.

What Jesus had actually tried to do was this. He had clearly seen the terrible abuses which had entered the Church of his fathers. He had loudly and sometimes successfully protested against them. But he had fought his battles for reform from within. Never apparently had if dawned upon him that he might be the founder of a new religion. If some one had mentioned the possibility of such a thing to him, he would have rejected the idea as preposterous. But, like many a reformer before his day and after, he had gradually been forced into a position where compromise was no longer possible. His untimely death alone had saved him from a fate like that of Luther and so many other advocates of reform who were deeply perplexed when they suddenly found themselves at the head of a brand new party 'outside' the organization to which they belonged, whereas they were merely trying to do some good from the 'inside'.

For many years after the death of Jesus, Christianity(to use the name long before it had been coined) was the religion of a small Jewish sect which had a few adherents in Jerusalem and in the villages of Judaea and Galilee and which, had never been heard of outside the province of Syria.

It was Gaius Julius Paulus, a full-fledged Roman citizen of Jewish descent, who had first recognized the possibilities of the new doctrine as a religion for all the world. The story of his suffering tells us how bitterly his former fellow-Jews had been opposed to the idea of a universal religion instead of a purely national denomination, membership to which should only be open to people of their own race. They had hated the man who dared preach salvation to Jews and Gentiles alike so bitterly that on his last visit to Jerusalem Paul would undoubtedly have suffered the fate of Jesus if his Roman passport had not saved him from the fury of his enraged compatriots.

But it had been necessary for a half a battalion of Roman soldiers to protect him and conduct him safely to the coastal town from where he could be shipped to Rome for that famous trial which never took place.

A few years after his death that which he had so often feared during his lifetime and which he had repeatedly foretold actually occurred.

Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans. On the place of the temple of Jehovah a new temple was erected in honour of Jupiter. The name of the city was changed to Aelia Capitolina and Judaea itself had become part of the Roman province of Syria Palestina,As for the inhabitants, they were either killed or driven into exile and no one was allowed in live within within miles of the ruins on pain of death.

It was the final destruction of their holy city which had been so disastrous to the Jewish Christians.During several centuries afterward, in the little villages of the Judaean hinterland colonies might have been found a strange people who called themselves "poor men" and who waited with great patience and amid everlasting prayers for the end of the world which was at hand. They were the remnants of the old JewishChristian community in Jerusalem. From time to time we hear them mentioned in books written during the fifth and sixth centuries. Far away from civilization,they developed certain strange doctrines of their own in which hatred for the Apostle Paul took a prominent place. After the seventh century however we no longer find any trace of these so-called Nazarenes and Ebionites. The victorious Mohammedans had killed them all. And, anyway, if they had managed to exist a few hundred years longer they would not have been able to avert the inevitable.

Rome, by bringing east and west and north and south into one large political union, had made the world ready for the idea of a universal religion. Christianity,because it was both simple and practical and full of a direct appeal, was predestined to succeed where Judaism and Mithraism and all of the other competing creeds were predestined to fail. But, unfortunately,the new faith never quite rid itself of certain rather unpleasant characteristics which only too clearly betrayed its origin.

The little ship which had brought Paul and Barnabas from Asia to Europe had carried a message of hope and mercy.

But a third passenger had smuggled himself on board.

He wore a mask of holiness and virtue.

But the face beneath bore the stamp of cruelty and hatred.

And his name was Religious Intolerance. y2ZWaC3zaw+TS9O5zCoZ27Fuel2ZDWhwbfa3oouAIkxGSEYzaCJ6NK7nyqjBFAWb