to laws proceeding from God, One and Universal, in fulfilment and continuation of a contemporary and superhuman history,—­that of Jesus Christ, the Son of God and Son of Man,—­that the Christians of the first two centuries labored to convert to their faith the whole Roman world.  Marcus Aurelius was contemptuously astonished at what he called the obstinacy of the Christians; he knew not from what source these nameless heroes drew a strength superior to his own, though he was at the same time emperor and sage.  It is impossible to assign with exactness the date of the first footprints and first labors of Christianity in Gaul.  It was not, however, from Italy, nor in the Latin tongue and through Latin writers, but from the East and through the Greeks, that it first came and began to spread.  Marseilles—­and the different Greek colonies, originally from Asia Minor and settled upon the shores of the Mediterranean or along the Rhone, mark the route and were the places whither the first Christian missionaries carried their teaching:  on this point the letters of the Apostles and the writings of the first two generations of their disciples are clear and abiding proof.  In the west of the empire, especially in Italy, the Christians at their first appearance were confounded with the Jews, and comprehended under the same name:  “The Emperor Claudius,” says Suetonius, “drove from Rome (A.D. 52) the Jews who, at the instigation of Christus, were in continual commotion.”  After the destruction of Jerusalem by Titus (A.D. 71), the Jews, Christian or not, dispersed throughout the Empire; but the Christians were not slow to signalize themselves by their religious fervor, and to come forward everywhere under their own true name.  Lyons became the chief centre of Christian preaching and association in Gaul.  As early as the first half of the second century there existed there a Christian congregation, regularly organized as a church, and already sufficiently important to be in intimate and frequent communication with the Christian Churches of the East and West.  There is a tradition, generally admitted, that St. Pothinus, the first Bishop of Lyons, was sent thither from the East by the Bishop of Smyrna, St. Polycarp, himself a disciple of St. John.  One thing is certain, that the Christian Church of Lyons produced Gaul’s first martyrs, amongst whom was the Bishop, St. Pothinus.

It was under Marcus Aurelius, the most philosophical and most conscientious of the emperors, that there was enacted for the first time in Gaul, against nascent Christianity, that scene of tyranny and barbarity which was to be renewed so often and during so many centuries in the midst of Christendom itself.  In the eastern provinces of the Empire and in Italy the Christians had already been several times persecuted, now with cold-blooded cruelty, now with some slight hesitation and irresolution.  Nero had caused them to be burned in the streets of Rome, accusing them of the conflagration himself had kindled, and,