In the midst of these striking pictures of the day and of the society of the quiet and comparatively happy times of the Emperor Trajan--in the last and perhaps the least interesting Book of his correspondence--the one generally known as the tenth Book, which contains his semi-official Letters to the Emperor, and some of Trajan’s replies,--stands out the great Christian episode in his government of Bithynia and Pontus, by far the most valuable notice that we possess of the numbers and of the influence of the Christian sect in the first years of the second century, only a few years after the death of S. John. The reference in Tacitus to the cruel persecution of Nero, and the yet briefer notices in Suetonius, are, of course, of the highest value; but the detailed story of Pliny, where he tells the Emperor actually what was taking place in the province of which he was governor, and gives us his own impressions of the works and days of the Christians, is and ever will be to the ecclesiastical historian the most precious testimony of a great pagan to the position which the Christians held in the Roman Empire some eighty years after the Resurrection morning. We have already, it will be remembered, dwelt at some length on what was evidently in Pliny’s mind on the subject--on the impressions, after a careful and lengthy investigation, which this unpopular sect made upon him. He tells his imperial friend and master exactly what he thought; and it is clear that the great Emperor was strangely moved by Pliny’s words, and framed his famous rescript upon the report in question on the gentler lines we have dwelt upon above. The value of such a picture of very early Christian life, painted by an eminent pagan statesman and scholar in the midst of such a work, so carefully arranged, so thought out, prepared, as we have seen, for posterity, as the Letters of Pliny were, can never be too highly valued. II VOGUE OF EPISTOLARY FORM OF LITERATURE How Pliny was admired and copied in the Roman world of literature we learn from the subsequent story of Roman literature preserved to us. With the exception of the writings of Suetonius, Pliny’s friend, for a lengthened period after the reign of Trajan, an age splendidly illustrated by the writings of Tacitus and Pliny, little literature has come down to us; very silent, indeed, after Trajan’s age seems to have been the highly cultured and literary society of Rome of which Pliny writes in such vivid and appreciative terms.