There is no shadow of doubt but that in a comparatively short space of time the religion of Jesus was accepted by great numbers of the dwellers in the various provinces of the Roman Empire. This fact is abundantly testified to by contemporary writers, Christian and pagan. The only other widely professed religion with which we can compare it--Mahommedanism--owed its rapid progress and the extraordinary numbers of its proselytes mainly to the sword of the conquerors. Christianity, on the other hand, possessed no army to enforce its tenets. It was not even the heritage of a people or a nation. The Jews, to whom in the first days of its existence it _might_ have belonged, were very soon to be reckoned among its deadliest foes. One powerful factor which influenced the reception of the new religion has been rarely dwelt upon, but it deserves more than a merely passing notice. The news of the religion of Jesus, as by many channels it reached the slave, often a highly educated slave, the freedman, the merchant, the small trader, the soldier of the legions, the lawyer, the Roman patrician, the women of the varied classes and orders in the great Empire,--the news came of something that had quite recently happened; and not only recently, but in a well-known city of the Empire. It was a wonderful story, firmly and strongly attested by many eye-witnesses, and it appealed at once to the hearts of all sorts and conditions of men. It differed curiously from all other religions of which the pagans of the Empire had ever heard. These other religions were very ancient; their cradle, so to speak, belonged to far-back days--pre-historical days, as men would now call them. _This new religion really belonged to their own time._ Its founder had talked with men quite recently. He had lived in a city they knew a good deal about. There was no dim mist about its origin; no old legends had gathered round it--legends which few, if any, believed. The story of the religion of Jesus, told so simply, so convincingly, in the four Gospels, had a strange attraction; it went home to the hearts of a vast multitude; it rang true and real. * * * * * We know that very soon after the date of the events of the Gospel story the numbers of the men and women who accepted it were great. From the pagan Empire we have the testimony of Tacitus, the most eminent of Roman historians. Writing some fifty years after the first persecution under Nero, A.D. 64, he describes the Christians at the time of that first persecution as “a vast multitude” (_ingens multitudo_).[40]