After His resurrection He appeared among His disciples and commissioned them to evangelize the world. As they went about this work they encountered the same spirit of opposition that had met their Master. Whippings, imprisonment, and martyrdom confronted them on every hand, and when they extended their labors beyond the borders of Palestine, notwithstanding the general religious tolerance that obtained in the Roman empire, the Christians were everywhere spoken against, and their ministers everywhere opposed and persecuted. Passing by the persecutions inflicted upon the Christians by the Jews--the whipping of Peter and John, under the order of the Jewish Sanhedrim, the martyrdom of Stephen, the execution of Saint James, the repeated mobbing and whippings of Paul--I call attention to the first great pagan persecution under the cruel edict of the Emperor Nero, in the second half of the first Christian century. The emperor having set on fire the city of Rome in order that he might view a great conflagration, and wishing to divert suspicion from himself, he first accused and then tried to compel the Christians to confess the crime. At this point I summon Tacitus, the renowned Roman annalist, to tell the remainder of the story: "With this view he inflicted the most exquisite tortures on those men who, under the vulgar appellation of Christians, were already branded with deserved infamy. They derived their name and origin from Christ, who, in the reign of Tiberius, had suffered death by the sentence of the procurator Pontius Pilate. For awhile this dire superstition was checked, but it again burst forth, and not only spread itself over Judea, the first seat of this mischievous sect, but was even introduced into Rome, the common asylum, which receives and protects whatever is impure, whatever is atrocious. The confessions of those that were seized discovered a great multitude of their accomplices, and they were all convicted not so much for the crime of setting fire to the city, as for their hatred of human kind. They died in torments, and their torments were embittered by insults and derision. Some were nailed on crosses; others sewn up in the skins of wild beasts and exposed to the fury of dogs; others, again, smeared over with combustible materials, were used as torches to illuminate the darkness of the night. The gardens of Nero were destined for the melancholy spectacle, which was accompanied with a horse race, and honored with the {LV} presence of the emperor, who mingled with the populace in the dress and attitude of a charioteer. The guilt of the Christians deserved indeed the most exemplary punishments, but the public abhorrence was changed into commiseration from the opinion that those unhappy wretches were sacrificed, not so much to the public welfare as to the cruelty of a jealous tyrant." [46]