When Pliny, about the middle of the year 111, came to the scene of his government,--the provinces of Bithynia and Pontus,--apparently somewhat to his surprise he found a very considerable portion of the population members of the Christian community. The religion professed by these people, Pliny was well aware, was unlawful in the eyes of the State, and the sect generally was unpopular; and evil rumours were current respecting its traditional practices. The new governor knew of the existence of the sect in Rome, but little more. He was clearly aware that these Christians had been the object of many State persecutions and judicial inquiries, “cognitiones” he terms them, and no doubt knew something, too, of the public severity with which these adherents of an unlawful religion had been treated by the State when convicted of the crime of Christianity. The horrors of the amphitheatre in the case of these condemned ones could not have been unknown to one like Pliny. But the great world in which Pliny lived and moved and worked, cared little for human life or human suffering in the case of a despised and outlawed community. The Roman teacher and patrician of the days of Trajan held human life very cheaply. The amphitheatre games, to take one phase only of Roman life in the days of the Empire, were an evil education for Rome. The execution, the sufferings of a few score Christian outlaws, however frequently repeated, would attract very little attention in Pliny’s world. But now in his new government he was brought face to face with grave difficulties occasioned by the practices and teaching of this Christianity. And when he discovered in addition how numerous a body these followers of the forbidden religion were, Pliny set himself in good earnest to investigate the Christian question. More than fifty years had passed since S. Peter first preached the gospel and laid the foundation stories of the Christian Church in these northern provinces of Asia Minor. The religion of Jesus had rapidly taken root in these districts. This we gather from the First Epistle of Peter, which he wrote to the followers of Jesus in the north of Asia Minor from Rome in the closing years of his ministry; and now Pliny found in his province no novel faith growing up, but a faith which had taken deep root in the hearts of the population, not only in the towns, but also in the more remote villages (_neque enim civitates tantum sed vicos etiam atque agros superstitionis istius contagio pervagata est_), with the result that the old pagan cult was being gradually abandoned. The temples were being fast deserted (_prope jam desolata templa_), the sacred rites were being given up, and what evidently excited bitter complaints on the part of the traders who suffered, there was no longer any market for the fodder of the beasts sacrificed (_pastum ... victimarum quarum adhuc rarissimus emptor inveniebatur_).