Had the Christian cult been, like its non-Jewish contemporaries, a mere effort to "worship God according to conscience," it need not have undergone pagan persecution any more than they, or than Judaism, save when the State imposed the duty of worshipping the emperor's statue. A God the more was no scandal to polytheists. Christism had taken from Judaism, however, as a first principle, the detestation of "idols," and its propaganda from the first had included a violent polemic against them. For the Christians the pagan Gods were not unrealities: they were evil dæmons, constantly active. Insofar, too, as the first Jesuists in the western part of the empire shared the Jewish hatred for Rome that is expressed in the Apocalypse, they were likely enough to provoke Roman violence. A constant prediction of the speedy passing away of all things was in itself a kind of sedition; and when joined with contumely towards all other religions it could not but rouse resentment. Thus, though the story of the great Neronian massacre is, as already noted, an apparent fiction as regards the Christians, being unnoticed in the book of Acts, Jesuists and Jews alike ran many chances of local or general hostility under the empire from the first. The express doctrines, put in the mouth of the founder, that he had come to bring not peace but a sword, and to create strife in families, were not fitted to soften the prejudices aroused by the religious claims of the new faith; and in the time of Tertullian they were defined in the west as "enemies of the Gods, of the emperors, of the laws, of morals, and of all nature."