The true state of the case seems to have been this.  The deep calamities in which, during the whole reign of Marcus the Empire was involved, caused wide-spread distress, and roused into peculiar fury the feelings of the provincials against men whose atheism (for such they considered it to be) had kindled the anger of the gods.  This fury often broke out into paroxisms of popular excitement, which none but the firmest-minded governers were able to moderate or to repress.  Marcus, when appealed to, simply let the existing law take its usual course.  That law was as old as the time of Trajan.  The young Pliny, Governor of Bithynia, had written to ask Trajan how he was to deal with the Christians, whose blamelessness of life he fully admitted, but whose doctrines, he said, had emptied the temples of the gods, and exasperated their worshippers.  Trajan in reply had ordered that the Christians should not be sought for, but that, if they were brought before the governor, and proved to be contumacious in refusing to adjure their religion, they were then to be put to death.  Hadrian and Antoninus Pius had continued the same policy, and Marcus Aurilius saw no reason to alter it.  But this law, which in quiet times might become a mere dead letter, might at more troubled periods be converted into a dangerous engine of persecution, as it was in the case of the venerable Polycarp, and in the unfortunate Churches of Lyons and Vienne.  The Pagans believed that the reason why their gods were smiling in secret,—­

     “Looking over wasted lands,
      Blight and famine, plague and earthquake, roaring deeps and fiery
      sands,—­

     “Clanging fights, and flaming towns, and sinking ships, and praying
      hands,—­”

was the unbelief and impiety of these hated Galileans, causes of offence which could only be expiated by the death of the guilty.  “Their enemies,” says Tertullian, “call aloud for the blood of the innocent, alleging this vain pretext for their hatred, that they believe the Christians to be the cause of every public misfortune.  If the Tiber has overflowed its banks, or the Nile has not overflowed, if heaven has refused its rain, if famine or the plague has spread its ravages, the cry is immediate, ‘The Christians to the lions.’” In the first three centuries the cry of “No Christianity” became at times as brutal, as violent, and as unreasoning as the cry of “No Popery” has often been in modern days.  It was infinitely less disgraceful to Marcus to lend his ear to the one than it has been to some eminent modern statesmen to be carried away by the insensate fury of the other.