True, but the fact remains that Nero burnt Christians in his gardens after the great fire of Rome, and that certain later emperors are found punishing Christians merely for avowing themselves such.  Why was Christianity thus singled out?  It was not through what can be reasonably called “religious intolerance,” for, as has been said, the Romans did not seek to force Roman religion on other peoples nor did they make any inquisition into the beliefs of Romans themselves.  The reasons for singling out Christianity for special treatment are obvious enough.  The question is not whether the reasons were sound, whether the Romans properly understood or tried to understand, whether they could be as wise before the event as we are after it, but whether the motive was what we should call a “religious” one.  To allow Epicureans to deny the existence of gods at all, and to make scornful concessions to the peculiar tenets of Jews, could not be the action of a people which was bigoted.  If there was bigotry and intolerance, it was political or social bigotry and intolerance, not religious.  To prevent any possible misconception let the present writer say here that he considers the principles of Christianity, as laid down by its Founder and as spread by St. Paul, to have been the most humanizing and civilising influence ever brought to bear upon society.  But that is not the point.  The early Christians were treated as they were, not because they held non-Roman views, but because they held anti-Roman views; not because they did not believe in Jupiter and Venus, but because they refused to let any one else believe in them; not because they threatened to weaken Roman faith, but because they threatened to weaken and even to wreck the whole fabric of Roman society; not because they were known to be heretics, but because they were supposed to be disloyal; not because they converted men, but because they appeared to convert them into dangerous characters.  As it has been put, the Christians were regarded as the “Nihilists” of the period.  We are apt to judge the Romans from the standpoint of Christianity dominant and understood; it is fairer to judge them from the standpoint of a dominant pagan empire looking on at a strange new phenomenon altogether misunderstood and often deliberately misrepresented.  Moreover—­and the point is worth more attention than it commonly receives—­we have only to read the Epistles to the Corinthians, to perceive that the early Christian gatherings were by no means always such meek, pure, and model assemblages as they are almost always assumed to have been.  Some of the members, for instance, quarrelled and “were drunken.”  There were evidently many unworthy members of the new communion, and of course there were also many manifestations of insulting bigotry on their part.  The class of society to which the Christians belonged was closely associated in the Roman mind with the rabble and the slave, if not with criminals.  What the pagan observer saw