Then came the persecution by the Pagans.  The Romans tolerated all the religions of the East because the devotees of Osiris, of Mithra, and of the Good Goddess recognized at the same time the Roman gods.  But the Christians, worshippers of the living God, scorned the petty divinities of antiquity.  More serious still in the eyes of the Romans, they refused to adore the emperor as a god and to burn incense on the altar of the goddess Roma.  Several emperors promulgated edicts against the Christians, bidding the governors arrest them and put them to death.  A letter of Pliny the Younger, then governor in Asia, to the emperor Trajan, shows the procedure against them.  “Up to this time, regarding the people who have been denounced as Christians, I have always operated as follows:  I asked them if they were Christians; if they confessed it, I put the question to them a second time, and then a third time, threatening them with the penalty of death.  When they persisted, I had them put to death, convinced that, whatever their fault that they avowed, their disobedience and their resolute obstinacy merited punishment.  Many who have been denounced in anonymous writings have denied that they were Christians, have repeated a prayer that I pronounced before them, have offered wine and incense to your statue, which I had set forth for this purpose together with the statues of the gods, and have even reviled the name of Christ.  All these are things which it is not possible to compel any true Christians to do.  Others have confessed that they were Christians, but they affirm that their crime and their error consisted only in assembling on certain days before sunrise to adore Christ as God, to sing together in his honor, and to bind themselves by oath to commit no crime, to perpetrate no theft, murder, adultery, nor to violate their word.  I have believed it necessary in order to secure the truth to put to the torture two female slaves whom they called deaconesses; but I have discovered only an absurd and exaggerated superstition.”

The Roman government was a persecutor,[165] but the populace were severer yet.  They could not endure these people who worshipped another god than theirs and contemned their deities.  Whenever famine or epidemic occurred, the well-known cry was heard, “To the lions with the Christians!” The people forced the magistrates to hunt and persecute the Christians.

=The Martyrs.=—­For the two centuries and a half that the Christians were persecuted, throughout the empire there were thousands of victims, of every age, sex, and condition.  Roman citizens, like St. Paul, were beheaded; the others were crucified, burned, most often sent to the beasts in the amphitheatre.  If they were allowed to escape with their lives, they were set at forced labor in the mines.  Sometimes torture was aggravated by every sort of invention.  In the great execution at Lyons, in 177, the Christians, after being tortured and confined in narrow prison