Manifestly a society so composed will be one of unusual tolerance.  The Romans had no disposition to force their religion on the subject provinces of the empire.  Their religion was the Roman religion; the religion of the Greeks might be left Greek, the Jewish religion Jewish, and the Egyptian religion Egyptian.  Any nation had a right to the religion of its fathers.  Nay, the Jews had such peculiar notions about a Sabbath day and other matters that a Jew was exempted from the military service which would have compelled him to break his national laws.  All religions were permitted, so long as they were national religions.  Also all religious views were permitted to the individual, so long as they were not considered dangerous to the empire or imperial rule, or so long as they threatened no appreciable harm to the social order.  If a Jew came to Rome and practised Judaism well and good.  It was, in the eyes of the Romans, a narrow-minded and uncharitable religion, marked by many strange and absurd practices and superstitions, but if a misguided oriental people liked to indulge in it, well and good.  Even if a Roman became a proselyte to Judaism, well and good, so long as he did not flout the official religion of his own country.  If the Egyptians chose to worship cats, ibises, and crocodiles, that was their affair, so long as they let other people alone.  In Gaul, it is true, the emperor Claudius, predecessor of Nero, had put down the Druids.  Earlier still the Druids had already been interfered with; but that was because the Druids—­those weird old white-sheeted men with their long beards and strange magic—­were performing human sacrifices—­burning men alive in wicker frames—­and such conduct was not only contrary to the secular law of Rome, but even to natural law.  And when Claudius finally suppressed them, or drove the remnant out of Gaul into Britain, it was not simply because they worshipped non-Roman gods and performed non-Roman rites, but because they were, as they had always notoriously been, a dangerous political influence interfering with the proper carrying out of the Roman government.

And when we come to Christianity it must be remarked that, so long as that nascent religion was regarded as merely a variety of Judaism, it was actually protected by the Roman power, and owes no little of its original progress to the fact.  In the Acts of the Apostles it is always from the Roman governor that St. Paul receives, not only the fairest, but the most courteous treatment.  It is the Jews who persecute him and work up difficulties against him, because to them he is a renegade and is weaning away their people.  To the philosophers at Athens he appears as the preacher of a new philosophy, and they think him a “smatterer” in such subjects.  To the Roman he is a man charged by a certain community with being dangerous to social order, to wit, causing factious disturbances and profaning the temple; and since he refuses to let the local authorities judge his case, and has exercised his citizen privilege by appealing to Caesar, to Caesar he is sent.  And, when a prisoner in somewhat free custody at Rome, note that he is permitted to speak “with all freedom,” and that in the first instance he is acquitted.