of the State, was one of those laws.  In some places, especially at Lyons and Vienne, the Christians were the victims of popular riots; but where they suffered by legal authority, in the name of the imperial government, it was under the well-known law of Trajan, a law which had been sixty years in operation when Marcus came upon the throne.  The only blame that can be imputed to him in this relation (if blame it be) is that of failing to discern and acknowledge the divine authority of the new religion which was silently undermining the old Roman world.  But no one who puts himself in the Emperor’s time and place will think the worse of him for not adopting a view of this subject which educated and serious minds were precisely the least likely to adopt.  To such, Christianity presented itself simply as a novelty opposed to religion and threatening the State.  The case of Justin may be cited as an instance of a thoughtful and philosophic mind embracing Christianity in spite of the strong presumption against it in minds of that class.  But, not to speak of the very wide difference between the steady, conservative Roman and the volatile Greek, all the life-circumstances of Justin, a Palestinian by birth, favored his adoption of the Christian faith; everything in the life of Antoninus tended in the opposite direction.  Justin embraced the religion first on its philosophic side, where Antoninus was especially fortified against it, having early come to an understanding with himself on the deepest questions of the soul.  His decisions on these questions did not differ materially from those of the Gospel; they might, unknown to himself, have been modified by a subtile atmospheric influence derived from that source and acting on a nature so receptive of its spirit.  But the very fact, that he had in a measure anticipated the teachings of the Gospel, precluded the chance of his being surprised into acquiescence with the new religion by its moral beauty, if brought fairly before him, which perhaps it never was; for it does not appear that he read the Christian apologies framed in his day.  What was best in Christianity, as a system of doctrine,—­its ethical precepts,—­he had already embraced; its substance he possessed; its external form he knew only as opposition to institutions which he was bound by all the sanctities of his office, by all the dignity of a Roman patrician, and by all the currents of his life, to uphold.  For the rest, the relation of a mind like his to polytheism could be nothing more than the formal acceptance of its symbols in the interest of piety, implying no intellectual enslavement to its myths and traditions.