Besides the private persecution which never ceased (and which is always more galling and unbearable than the public), there were at least ten great imperial crusades directed against Christianity. When we say directed against Christianity, we wish to be distinctly understood as meaning against _liberty_ and _equality_. About the _spiritualism_ of Christianity the pagan rulers cared not a straw, more than they did about their own gods. Religion was a mere pretence in the matter, as it is in all such matters. It served their purposes with the multitude (who alone are sincere on such occasions); and that is all they cared for. It is by viewing persecution in this light--the only true light--that modern reformers can profit by our remarks on this head. The first great persecution (which took place under Nero, about A.D. 64) is noticed by Tacitus in his “Annals.” From the language used by that historian, it is manifest that the wealthier classes of Rome regarded the Christians of that period as a most dangerous combination against not only the government, but (to use a _doctrinaire_ phrase) against “society” itself. Tacitus--himself an aristocrat--regarded the aristocratic orders of his day as constituting _society_; and finding these orders to be no favourites with the Christians, he roundly accuses the latter of “hatred towards the human race,” and describes them as followers of _one_ Christ, who was the founder of a “deplorable and destructive superstition”! In the same way, the Bonapartes, the Thiers, and the Guizots of the present day represent their own plundering class as _society_, and describe such men as Ledru Rollin, Mazzini, Louis Blanc, Proudhon, &c., as enemies of all law and order--as enemies of family, property, and religion,--in short, as warring against “the very existence of society itself” (their own words), because they preferred the rights and happiness of the great majority to the usurpations of a criminal and contemptible minority. It is now an established fact--a fact as well attested as any in history--that the insurrection and bloody carnage in June, 1848, was preconcerted and with great pains elaborated by the friends of “law and order,” in order to purge “society” of Red Republicanism and Socialism, or (to use their own phrase) _pour en finir_--_i.e._ to make a finish of the democratic and social republic by drowning it in the blood of its authors and most heroic defenders.