How coolly and contemptuously the
lordly proconsuls and magistrates regarded the early Christians. Pliny
did not so much as deign to notice their existence, and Pontius
Pilate, who had to deal with the first twelve, seems to have looked
upon them as mere pestilent malefactors who created a disturbance. For
many years those scornful Roman lords mocked the new sectarians and
refused to take them seriously. One scoffing magistrate asked the
Christians who came before him why they gave him the trouble to punish
them. Were there no ropes and precipices handy, he asked, for those
who wished to commit suicide? Those Romans had great names in their
day--names as great as the names of Ellenborough and Wellesley and
Gordon and Dalhousie and Bartle Frere, yet one would be puzzled to
write down a list of six of the omnipotent sub-emperors. They fought,
they made laws, they ruled empires, they fancied themselves only a
little less than the gods, and now not a man outside the circle of a
dozen scholars knows or cares anything about them. The wise lawgivers,
the dread administrators, the unconquerable soldiers have gone with
the snows, and their very names seem to have been writ in water.
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