These and many other like sunlit sayings of the Book of Life in the Gospels, Epistles, and Revelation of S. John were ever ringing in the ears of the Christians of the first days, and telling them of the _immortal hope_ which was their blessed treasure,--words which sweetened their hard and too frequently painful lot, which made them feel that they had made a good exchange when they gave up the fleeting and often sinful pleasures of earth for the sure hope of the immortal joys of heaven. They felt how poor and tawdry after all were the things they had renounced in comparison with what awaited them when the short and weary period of human life came to an end. In spite of what the believers renounced for the Name’s sake, notwithstanding the many daily trials and dangers to which they were ever exposed, they were strangely happy with a new happiness quite unknown in the old pagan world, with a joy no man could take from them. Pagan society, whenever it deigned to notice them, treated them with a contemptuous pity, which too often shaded into positive hatred. We see this in the “Acts” of the Martyrs from the questions put to them by the Roman officials when they were brought before the tribunals, simply because they were Christians. This was the estimate of the sect entertained by men like the great Antonine Emperors, Pius and Marcus. The summary of Fronto the famous rhetorician, Marcus’ tutor and friend, reproduced in the discourse of Cæcilius in the Dialogue of Minucius Felix, repeats too clearly the same disparaging view coloured with contempt and scarcely veiled hatred. Nowhere is the pagan conception of the misery and wretchedness of the Christian life more clearly expressed than in the picturesque and graphic poem of Rutilius Namatianus,[91] a contemporary of Paulinus of Nola in the first years of the fifth century. It is a comparatively late pagan criticism of Christianity, but it admirably expresses the common view of pagan society, and exactly coincides with the opinion of such eminent Romans as Marcus and his friend Fronto in the second century. “Is there any sense,” writes Rutilius, “in living a wretched life for fear of becoming unhappy? these Christians love to torture themselves: they are more cruel even than the offended gods. I ask the question, has not the sect the secret of poisons more deadly than any possessed by Circe; for Circe only brought about a danger in the body, but these people change the very soul?” The life of a Christian in the first two hundred and fifty years of the era was, however, as we have shown, emphatically no sad and mournful, no wretched existence. It was a life unspeakably bright and happy, undreamed of by any poet or philosopher in the many-sided story of paganism. BOOK III THE INNER LIFE OF THE CHURCH PART I