During his reign the Church endured a persecution severer than any it had yet known. How far he was personally responsible for this we cannot tell. He was not wholly guilty nor yet wholly innocent. He certainly ordered the torture and execution of the Martyrs of Lyons; his most intimate friend sentenced St. Justin to death at Rome; and his most trusted lawyer condemned St. Felicitas and her sons; but, on the other hand, many of the persecutions were due to the anger of the mob, and withal he knew not what he did. The Christians were to him merely an uncultured and fanatical sect without a single redeeming virtue. In the only passage in the Meditations where he mentions them he attributes their constancy in death to sheer perverseness. After expressing his admiration for a soul, “which is ready, if at any moment it must be separated from the body, to be extinguished, or dissolved, or to continue to exist,” he adds, “but this readiness must come from a man’s own judgment, not from mere obstinacy as with the Christians, but with considerateness, with gravity, so as to be persuasive without tragic show.” With such a view of the Christian character it is not strange that he felt no qualms in sanctioning, though he did not instigate, the first persecution that bore the semblance of being universal and systematic. Furthermore, Roman tradition was law for him; and Roman tradition was very clear as to the treatment which Christians deserved. The superstitious pagans attributed all public calamities to the wrath of their gods, and this wrath to the contempt which the Christians showed for the pagan idols. As Tertullian puts it: “The Christians are the cause of all disasters, of all public calamities. If the Tiber floods Rome, if the Nile does not flood the plains, if the heavens are closed, if the earth trembles, if a famine takes place or a war or a plague, immediately a cry is raised ‘The Christians to the lions! to death with the Christians!’” Now, the reign of Marcus was one of singular calamities, all the more aggravating because unforeseen and irresistible and devastating the city and the Empire at the culminating point of their prosperity. The reign opened with wars and rumours of wars on the frontiers; the Tiber overflowed Rome; there had been a plague and a famine. Here truly was the anger of the gods against the Roman welfare--the _deorum ira in rem Romanam_ of Tacitus. The mob howled for Christian blood; and Marcus was too weak or too little concerned to resist. Antoninus, Hadrian, Trajan had consented to the torture of the fanatics, though they had not shared the popular prejudices against them; many of the lawyers and philosophers had counselled it for the good of the State; why should he say no? His better nature probably revolted from such brutality, but it is the misfortune of diffident conventionalists, such as he, that they sacrifice their better instincts to the received views of ruder natures.