causing them was almost infinitesimal. If those who love his memory reject the evidence of Fathers in his favour, they may be at least permitted to withhold assent from some of the assertions in virtue of which he is condemned. Marcus in his _Meditations_ alludes to the Christians once only, and then it is to make a passing complaint of the indifference to death, which appeared to him, as it appeared to Epictetus, to arise, not from any noble principles, but from mere obstinacy and perversity. That he shared the profound dislike with which Christians were regarded is very probable. That he was a cold-blooded and virulent persecutor is utterly unlike his whole character, essentially at variance with his habitual clemency, alien to the spirit which made him interfere in every possible instance to mitigate the severity of legal punishments, and may in short be regarded as an assertion which is altogether false. Who will believe that a man who during his reign built and dedicated but one single temple, and that a Temple to Beneficence; that a man who so far from showing any jealousy respecting foreign religions allowed honour to be paid to them all; that a man whose writings breathe on every page the inmost spirit of philanthropy and tenderness, went out of his way to join in a persecution of the most innocent, the most courageous, and the most inoffensive of his subjects? The true state of the case seems to have been this. The deep calamities in which, during the whole reign of Marcus the Empire was involved, caused wide-spread distress, and roused into peculiar fury the feelings of the provincials against men whose atheism (for such they considered it to be) had kindled the anger of the gods. This fury often broke out into paroxisms of popular excitement, which none but the firmest-minded governers were able to moderate or to repress. Marcus, when appealed to, simply let the existing law take its usual course. That law was as old as the time of Trajan. The young Pliny, Governor of Bithynia, had written to ask Trajan how he was to deal with the Christians, whose blamelessness of life he fully admitted, but whose doctrines, he said, had emptied the temples of the gods, and exasperated their worshippers. Trajan in reply had ordered that the Christians should not be _sought_ for, but that, if they were brought before the governor, and proved to be contumacious in refusing to adjure their religion, they were then to be put to death. Hadrian and Antoninus Pius had continued the same policy, and Marcus Aurilius saw no reason to alter it. But this law, which in quiet times might become a mere dead letter, might at more troubled periods be converted into a dangerous engine of persecution, as it was in the case of the venerable Polycarp, and in the unfortunate Churches of Lyons and Vienne. The Pagans believed that the reason why their gods were smiling in secret,--