far as everywhere Jewish hatred and jealousy could malign and counterwork the progress of the Christian Faith, and bring suffering on its teachers, it had been done. But nevertheless with this exception it would seem that for thirty-five years after the day of Pentecost that Faith had been freely and publicly taught throughout the empire. It was through the malignity of his own countrymen, stirring up a dangerous conspiracy against him, that S. Paul felt himself compelled to appeal to the emperor, and the result of his appeal was that he was set free. But in the year 64 another state of things had arisen. The ruin of a large part of Rome by fire had brought a great odium upon Nero. Now his wife Poppæa is said to have been a Jewish proselyte, he himself to have been surrounded by Jewish influences, and nothing is more probable than that Jewish hatred, which had tracked the Christians everywhere, pursued them especially here, and suggested them to him both as authors of the conflagration, and as convenient scapegoats whereon to divert the odium against himself which had arisen from it. Thus he took the opportunity of exposing to shame and torment, as victims of the popular dislike, and in popular opinion guilty of “hatred of the human race,” or of being hated by them, “a vast multitude”(141) of Christians, who, says the heathen historian, were put to the most exquisite suffering, being wrapt in the skins of wild beasts, and torn to pieces by dogs, or crucified, or clothed in garments of pitch and set on fire to illuminate the night. Thus it is, as decorations of Nero’s games, in his gardens of the Vatican, where the obelisk from Heliopolis, once the ornament of his circus, now bears witness to the victory of Christ, that Christians first come before us in the pages of Roman historians, just at the middle of the period we are now describing, thirty-five years after the Ascension. It may be considered part of this first persecution that the two great Apostles—Peter, who had founded the Roman Church, and Paul, who after its first foundation had helped to build it up—were condemned in the last year of Nero, and by his deputies(142) during his absence, to suffer as Christians, the one the death of a Roman citizen by the sword, and the other that of a slave by crucifixion. Thus the two great brethren by enduring together the martyr’s death, the highest mark of Christian charity, sealed their joint foundation of Christian Rome, that like as the Rome which had gained the conquest of the world by the strong hand of violence, had been planted in the blood of one brother shed by another, so the Rome which was to be the centre of Christ’s kingdom, and in the words of S. Ignatius “preside over charity,” should have for her founders brethren in supernatural love, pouring forth their blood together for the seat of that Christian unity which binds the earth in one.