Who would have dreamed that this was the germ of the most potent, the most regenerative force the world had ever known?  That thrones, empires, principalities, and powers would melt and crumble before His name?  Of all miracles, is not this the greatest?

The passionate ardor with which this religion was propagated in the first two centuries had no motive but the yearning to make others share in its benefits and hopes; and to this end to accept the belief that Jesus Christ had come in fulfilment of the promise of a Saviour—­who should be sent to this world clothed with divine authority to establish a spiritual kingdom, in which he was King of kings, Lord of lords, Meditator between us and the Father, of whom he was the “only begotten Son.”

The religion in its essence was absolutely simple.  Its founder summed it up in two sentences:  expressing the duty of man to man, and of man to God.  That was all the theology he formulated.

For two centuries the religion of Christ was an elemental spiritual force.  It appealed only to the highest attributes and longings of the human soul, and under its sustaining influence frail women, men, and even children were able to endure tortures, of which we cannot read even now without shuddering horror.

Nature’s method of gardening is very beautiful.  She carefully guards the seed until it is ripe, then she bursts the imprisoning walls and gives it to the winds to distribute.  Precisely such method was used in disseminating Christianity.  It was not for one people—­it was for the healing of the nations, and its home was wherever man abides.

Nearly five decades after Christ’s death upon the cross, Jerusalem was destroyed by Titus.  The home of Christianity was effaced.  At just the right moment the enclosing walls had broken, and freed to the winds the germs in all their primitive purity.

Imperial favor had not tarnished it, human ambitions had not employed and degraded it, nor had it been made into complex system by ingenious casuists.  The pure spiritual truth, unsullied as it came from the hand of its founder, was scattered broadcast, as the band of Christians dispersed throughout the Roman Empire, naturally forming into communities here and there, which became the centres of Christian propagandism.  Lyons in Gaul was such a centre.

The fires of persecution had been lighted here and there throughout the empire, and the Emperor Nero, under whom the Apostles Peter and Paul are said to have suffered martyrdom, had amused himself by making torches of the Christians at Rome.  But until A.D. 177 Gaul was exempt from such horrors.

Marcus Aurelius—­that peerless pagan—­large in intelligence, exalted in character, and guided by a conscientious rectitude which has made his name shine like a star in the lurid light of Roman history, still failed utterly to comprehend the significance of this spiritual kingdom established by Christ on earth.  He it was who ordered the first persecution in Gaul.  In pursuance of his command, horrible tortures were inflicted at Lyons upon those who would not abjure the new faith.