Marcus in his _Meditations_ alludes to the Christians once only, and
then it is to make a passing complaint of the indifference to death,
which appeared to him, as it appeared to Epictetus, to arise, not from
any noble principles, but from mere obstinacy and perversity. That he
shared the profound dislike with which Christians were regarded is very
probable. That he was a cold-blooded and virulent persecutor is utterly
unlike his whole character, essentially at variance with his habitual
clemency, alien to the spirit which made him interfere in every possible
instance to mitigate the severity of legal punishments, and may in short
be regarded as an assertion which is altogether false. Who will believe
that a man who during his reign built and dedicated but one single
temple, and that a Temple to Beneficence; that a man who so far from
showing any jealousy respecting foreign religions allowed honour to be
paid to them all; that a man whose writings breathe on every page the
inmost spirit of philanthropy and tenderness, went out of his way to
join in a persecution of the most innocent, the most courageous, and the
most inoffensive of his subjects?

The true state of the case seems to have been this. The deep calamities
in which, during the whole reign of Marcus the Empire was involved,
caused wide-spread distress, and roused into peculiar fury the feelings
of the provincials against men whose atheism (for such they considered
it to be) had kindled the anger of the gods. This fury often broke out
into paroxisms of popular excitement, which none but the firmest-minded
governers were able to moderate or to repress. Marcus, when appealed to,
simply let the existing law take its usual course. That law was as old
as the time of Trajan. The young Pliny, Governor of Bithynia, had
written to ask Trajan how he was to deal with the Christians, whose
blamelessness of life he fully admitted, but whose doctrines, he said,
had emptied the temples of the gods, and exasperated their worshippers.