of Christianity showed that the Pagans were but amateurs in the art of punishing for a difference of opinion. [25] I am taking the story of the persecutions of the early Christians for granted, although the whole question is surrounded with the greatest suspicion. As a matter of fact the accounts are grossly exaggerated, and some of the alleged persecutions never occurred. The story of the persecutions is so foreign to the temper of the Roman government as to throw doubt on the whole account. The story of there being ten persecutions is clearly false, the number being avowedly based upon the legend of the ten plagues of Egypt. Up to a comparatively recent time there existed a practically unanimous opinion among Christians as to the desirability of forcibly suppressing heretical opinions. Whatever the fortunes of Christianity, and whatever the differences of opinion that gradually developed among Christians there was complete unanimity on this point. Whatever changes the Protestant Reformation effected it left this matter untouched. In his _History of Rationalism_ Lecky has brought forward a mass of evidence in support of this, and I must refer to that work readers who are not already acquainted with the details. Luther, in the very act of pleading for toleration, excepted "such as deny the common principles of the Christian religion, and advised that the Jews should be confined as madmen, their synagogues burned and their books destroyed." The intolerance of Calvin has became a byword; his very apology for the burning of Servetus, entitled _A Defence of the Orthodox Faith_, bore upon its title page the significant sentence "In which it is proved that heretics may justly be coerced with the sword." His follower, Knox, was only carrying out the teaching of the master in declaring that "provoking the people to idolatry ought not to be exempt from the penalty of death," and that "magistrates and people are bound to do so (inflict the death penalty) unless they will provoke the wrath of God against themselves." In every Protestant country laws against heresy were enacted. In Switzerland, Geneva, Sweden, England, Germany, Scotland, nowhere could one differ from the established faith without running the risk of torture and death. Even in America, with the exception of Maryland,[26] the same state of things prevailed. In some States Catholic priests were subject to imprisonment for life, Quaker women were whipped through the streets at the cart's tail, old men of the same denomination were pressed to death between stones. At a later date (about 1770) laws against heresy were general. "Anyone," says Fiske,--