The contest with Judaism in both its phases had but a restricted scope, if we compare it with that manifold contest with error which filled the whole history of the Church from the Day of Pentecost to the convocation of the Nicene Council. It is not easy to realise the circumstances under which that contest was waged. First, from the persecution begun under Nero in the year 64, to the edicts of Constantine in 311-313, the Christian Church lay under the ban of the Empire as an illicit religion. It is indeed true that the whole of this long period of two hundred and fifty years is not a time of active persecution. There are intervals throughout, of considerable length, in which the Church carried on her silent course of conversion, without the law being executed against her, with at least anything like a general intention to destroy her. Still, even in these intervals, she was in the condition of a society in opposition at all points to the powers of the world, and, to say the least, discouraged by the spirit of the time. She could not unfold and publish her constitution. The thing of all others which she could least venture to disclose was her _polity_, that episcopate with its centre in Rome which was the bond of her strength as a regimen. In spite of herself, Roman law forced her into the position, in many respects at least, of a secret society; secret, not because her doctrines in themselves required concealment; secret, not because her polity was in itself an infringement of the Empire's civil rights, but because both doctrine and polity involved a change in the religious, social, and civil relations of the world which the Roman Empire was not prepared to concede, and which, had it divined, not Nero alone, or Domitian, "a portion of Nero in his cruelty,"[168] but every Roman emperor, with Trajan at their head, would have stamped out. Again, it is difficult to realise the condition of a religious society which could not carry out its worship under the protection which publicity confers. Yet as to this we have no authority to show that there were public Christian churches before the reign of Alexander Severus, two hundred years after the Church began. Her eucharistic liturgy was a secret; her sacred books were kept out of the sight of the heathen; but even so the language and the treatment of subjects in these books, not to speak of the choice of those subjects, betoken that they belonged to a society which needed not only the harmlessness of the dove but the wisdom of the serpent. It had need to keep its head under cover. To take one instance out of many. I do not know a more remarkable example of reticence than that passage in the Acts of the Apostles wherein it is said of Peter, that when delivered by the angel from prison, he sent a message to James and the brethren, and then "went out and departed into another place." Here St. Luke, writing in a time of active persecution, rather more than twenty years after the event