After this time, Christianity spread in Armenia as it did in other parts of the Greek Empire; rapidly in the cities, where intelligence was quick, and new ideas were welcomed; slowly in the country districts, where people did not readily change. Its first result everywhere was not so much to make people believe in it as to make them disbelieve in Paganism; for every person who actually came to believe in Christ, there were fifty who ceased to believe in Jupiter, or Bel, or Thoth, Venus or Astarte. There would be a flourishing Christian church in a great city when most of the people did not have any faith in any religion. But everybody who had a family came gradually to think very well of a religion that gave them the power to teach children righteousness, and enforce it by the command of God; and the respectable classes became more and more Christian. But the fact that till two or three centuries after Christ there was no general attempt on the part of the pagan governments to put down the Christians by persecution, shows that not till then did they become so numerous as to frighten the governments for fear they would before long have a majority; persecution means fear. The governments let the Christians pretty much alone, except for little fits of anger now and then, till they were afraid the growth of the sect would overthrow themselves or bring on civil war. The Christians had become well established in Armenia within a century or so after the death of Christ; but it was over a century and a half before they seemed an imminent menace to the ruling class. Then a furious persecution began, about the same time as that of Diocletian in the Roman Empire, and indeed, part of the same movement. Diocletian had set the persecuting King Tiridates on his throne, and Tiridates had passed his life from boyhood almost to old age in the Roman service, and had the same ideas as the pagan Roman upper classes. Yet in the providence of God this same Tiridates made Christianity supreme in Armenia, fifteen years before Constantine made it supreme in the Roman Empire, thus making Armenia the first Christian nation. GREGORY THE ILLUMINATOR AND KING DERTAD.