bronze equestrian statue was set up in the Forum, now on the Capitol. Aurelius throughout his reign was hostile to Christianity. The Christians suffered from systematic persecution, and many historians, with a strange lack of historical insight, have poured denunciation upon him for an attitude which was the natural outcome of his convictions. During his reign the atmosphere of Roman society was heavily charged with the popular Greek philosophy to which, ethics apart, Christianity was diametrically opposed. Under Antoninus the "pursuit" of Christians was unknown; under Trajan and Hadrian it was forbidden (cf. Keim, _Aus dem Urchrist_, p. 99). But Aurelius was an eager patriot and a man of logical mind. From his earliest youth he had learned to identify the ritual of the Roman religion with the very essence of the imperial idea. He became a Salian priest at the age of eight, and soon knew by heart all the forms and liturgical order of the official worship, and even the sacred music. In the earliest statue we have he is a youth offering incense; he is a priest at the sacrificial altar in the latest triumphal reliefs. Naturally he felt that the prevalence of Christianity was incompatible with his ideal of Roman prosperity, and therefore that the policy of the Flavian emperors was the only logical solution of an important problem. Neumann argued that the recrudescence of active persecution was initiated by a deliberate ad hoc rescript issued probably in A.D. 176. Sir W. M. Ramsay, however, doubts this (_The Church in the Roman Empire_, London, 1893), and argues that it was due to a long series of instructions to provincial governors (_mandata_, not _decreta_) who interpreted their duty largely in conformity with the attitude of the reigning emperor. In other words the governors were ordered merely to punish sacrilege, and, under Aurelius, Christianity was regarded as such. In the second place, though it is true that the persecutions indicated by Celsus (Origen, _Celsus_, viii. 69), Justin, Melito (in Eusebius, _H.E._, iv. 26), Athenagoras (_Libellus pro Christianis_) and the _Acts of Martyrs_, were greatly in excess of those recorded in previous reigns, it must not be forgotten that it was only in this period that the Christians began to keep records. Thirdly, there can be no doubt that the Christians had recently assumed a much bolder attitude, and thus segregated themselves from the mass of those unorthodox sects which the Roman could afford to despise. Like the Druids in Gaul (cf. T. Mommsen, _Prov. Rom. Emp._, Eng. trans. i. 105, and V. Duruy, _Rev. archéol._, Apr. 1880), the Christians were particularly dangerous, inasmuch as they taught a unity which transcended that of the Roman Empire, and must, therefore, have been regarded as antagonistic to the existing political and social organism.