We know well what the educated class of the Romans thought of the Christians, when they thought of them at all. They regarded them as a sect of extremely absurd Jews, insanely obstinate, and wholly contemptible. If the professors and students of Harvard and Yale should read in the papers that a new sect had arisen among the Mormons, more eccentric and ridiculous even than the Mormons themselves, the intelligence would excite in their minds about the same feeling that the courtly scholars of the Roman Empire manifest when they speak of the early Christians. Nothing astonished them so much as their "obstinacy." "A man," says the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, "ought to be ready to die when the time comes; but this readiness should be the result of a calm judgment, and not be an exhibition of mere obstinacy, as with the Christians." The younger Pliny, too, in his character of magistrate, was extremely perplexed with this same obstinacy. He tells us that when people were brought before him charged with being Christians, he asked them the question, Are you a Christian? If they said they were, he repeated it twice, threatening them with punishment; and if they persisted, he ordered them to be punished. If they denied the charge, he put them to the proof by requiring them to repeat after him an invocation to the gods, and to offer wine and incense to the emperor's statue. Some of the accused, he says, reviled Christ; and this he regarded as a sure proof of innocence, for people told him there was no forcing real Christians to do an act of that nature. Some of the accused owned that they had been Christians once, three years ago or more, and some twenty years ago, but had returned to the worship of the gods. These, however, declared that, after all, there was no great offense in being Christians. They had merely met on a regular day before dawn, addressed a form of prayer to Christ as to a divinity, and bound themselves by a solemn oath not to commit fraud, theft, or other immoral act, nor break their word, nor betray a trust; after which they used to separate, then re-assemble, and eat together a harmless meal.