It then began (after A.D. 134-5), slowly at first, to dawn upon the statesmen of Rome that the Christian was no mere Jewish dissenter, but a member of a new and perfectly distinct community, a sect intensely in earnest, successful in making proselytes, possessing, too, a secret power which the Roman statesman marvelled at but was incapable of understanding,--a secret power which made the Christian absolutely fearless of death and utterly regardless of any punishment human ingenuity could devise; a sect, too, which, quite independent of the Jews, daily was multiplying, and was rapidly numbering in its ranks men and women of every calling, drawn, too, from every province indifferently in the wide Roman empire,--becoming, indeed, an Empire within an Empire. But the subjects of this inner Empire, while loyal to the State, obedient, and peaceful, dwelt as it were as a nation apart, professing an allegiance to an invisible Power unknown to the ancient traditions of Rome, and irreconcilably hostile to the ancient religion on which the true Roman loved to believe the grandeur of the Empire was based. The consciousness of all this may be said to have really dawned upon Roman statesmen only after the great change which passed over Judaism at the close of the awful war of Hadrian,--a change which showed for the first time the broad gulf which yawned between the Jewish people and the new Christian community. The last two years of Hadrian’s reign, which immediately followed the close of the great Jewish war, were marked by the adoption of a new and severer policy by the State in regard to Christians. We hear of cases of extreme harshness in the case of the treatment of Christians by the State. Many stories of martyrdom date from this period. This stern policy was pursued through the reign of the blameless Antoninus Pius, and became yet more pronounced and severe in the years of his successor, the yet nobler and purely patriotic Marcus, under whose rule, beneficent and just though it generally was, the Christians suffered as they had never suffered before. For the first time after the close of the great Jewish war, A.D. 133-A.D. 135, the imperial government recognised what a grave danger to the Roman polity, to its ancient religion and its beliefs, was Christianity. * * * * *