And for the first time, too, the pagan Emperors learnt from their officials that this new sect was not made up of Jews, as had been hitherto generally assumed, but that its members were something quite different--far, far more formidable and dangerous. It was true that there was no suggestion of any open revolt on the part of this strange group of subjects, such as Vespasian and Hadrian had to meet and to crush at Jerusalem and in Palestine in the case of the Jews; the danger to be feared from the Christians was that they were gradually winning the people’s hearts; that they were turning the people’s thoughts from the old gods of Rome to another and far greater Being, whom they averred was the loving Lord of all men, the supreme arbiter of life and death. And to Emperors like the Antonines, whose devout minds ever loved to dwell on the constant protection of the Immortals, who they were persuaded had loved Rome from time immemorial, in whom they strove with sad earnestness to believe, to whom they prayed and taught their people to pray,--to Emperors like Pius and Marcus these Christians, with their intense faith, a faith for which they were only too ready to die, were indeed abhorrent; in their eyes they constituted an ever-present, an ever-increasing danger to Rome, her glorious traditions, her ancient religion, her very existence. This was the secret of the new policy pursued by the State in its treatment of the Christians. It began to be adopted in the last years of Hadrian after the close of the great Jewish war in A.D. 134-5, when the Christian sect was discovered to be utterly separate from the Jews--distinct and even hostile to the Jewish race, with other and far more dangerous views and hopes; and when Antoninus Pius set himself to reform his people by reminding them of the manners and customs of their ancestors, by impressing upon them the duty of a more earnest worship of the old gods of Rome, he found in the Christians his most dangerous opponents; hence the stern treatment which the new sect received at his hands; hence the policy of persecution which gathered strength during his reign, and was intensified in the days of his adopted son and successor Marcus. On the whole, the usual verdict of tradition respecting the condition of Christians under the Antonines must be reversed. The reign of Antoninus Pius is commonly represented as a period of peace for the Church, and little is said about the treatment of Christians under the government of Antoninus Pius and of Marcus Antoninus. This favourable view and usual reticence concerning any Christian sufferings during these reigns is largely owing to the high estimation in which the two Antonines as rulers are universally held;--that these great and good Emperors could persecute and harass the followers of Jesus has been usually deemed unlikely if not impossible.