Early Christianity and Paganism

Whilst the greatest effort has been made to ensure the quality of this text, due to the historical nature of this content, in some rare cases there may be minor issues with legibility. Following a practice very different from that usual among professors of any of the persecuted forms of religion before their time, or even among professors of a persecuted religion after their time, the Christians throughout these years, although conscious of their numbers, their organisation and their power, never took up arms against their persecutors; these hated, despised, outlawed men continued to be the most loyal and peaceful subjects of the great world-wide Empire. It is this strange power of passive resistance, to which we have alluded above, and of which we shall speak again, which is one of the principal evidences of a special super natural assistance being vouchsafed to them.