In Part I, our narrative was confined mainly to those propitious circumstances which made for the successful introduction of the gospel and the founding of the church of Christ. In Part II, we are to deal with those adverse events which led finally to the subversion of the Christian religion. We commence with the 1. Persecution of the Christians by the Jews.--The Messiah forewarned his disciples that they would be persecuted by the world, pointed out the reasons for it, and comforted them by reminding them that the world had hated him before it hated them; that the servant was not greater than his lord; and for that matter all the prophets which were before them had been persecuted by the generations in which they lived, and that, for the reason that they were not of the world, therefore the world hated and destroyed them.[1] 2. Two special reasons may be assigned for the persecution of the saints by the Jews. 1. They looked upon Christianity as a rival religion to Judaism, a thing of itself sufficient to engender bitterness, jealousy, persecution. 2. If Christianity should live and obtain a respectable standing, the Jews of that generation must ever be looked upon as not only putting an innocent man to death, but as rejecting and slaying the Son of God. To crush this rival religion and escape the odium which the successful establishment of it would inevitably fix upon them, were the incentives which prompted that first general persecution which arose against the church in Jerusalem, and that commenced in the very first year after Messiah's ascension. {106} 3. The extent of the persecution or the time of its continuance may not be determined; but that it was murderous may be learned from the fact that Stephen was slain,[2] as was also James, the son of Zebedee,[3] and James, the Just, brother of the Lord.[4] The Apostle Peter was imprisoned and would doubtless have shared the fate of the other martyrs, but that he was delivered by an angel.[5] 4. Nor was this persecution confined alone to Jerusalem; on the contrary the hate-blinded high priests and elders of the Jews in Palestine conferred with the Jews throughout the Roman provinces, and everywhere incited them to hatred of the Christians, exhorting them to have no connection with, and to do all in their power to destroy the "superstition," as the Christian religion was then called. Nor were they content with what they themselves could do, but they exhausted their ingenuity in efforts to incite the Romans against them. To accomplish this they charged that the Christians had treasonable designs against the Roman government, as "appeared by their acknowledging as their king one Jesus, a malefactor whom Pilate had most justly put to death." [6]