carried away by the insensate fury of the other.

To what extent is Marcus Aurelius to be condemned for the martyrdoms
which took place in his reign? Not, I think, heavily or
indiscriminately, or with vehement sweeping censure. Common justice
surely demands that we should not confuse the present with the past, or
pass judgment on the conduct of the Emperor as though he were living in
the nineteenth century, or as though he had been acting in full
cognisance of the Gospels and the stones of the Saints. Wise and good
men before him had, in their haughty ignorance, spoken of Christianity
with execration and contempt. The philosophers who surrounded his throne
treated it with jealousy and aversion. The body of the nation firmly
believed the current rumours which charged its votaries with horrible
midnight assemblies, rendered infamous by Thyestian banquets and the
atrocities of nameless superstitions. These foul calumnies--these
hideous charges of cannibalism and incest,--were supported by the
reiterated perjury of slaves under torture, which in that age, as well
as long afterwards, was preposterously regarded as a sure criterion
of truth.

Christianity in that day was confounded with a multitude of debased and
foreign superstitions; and the Emperor in his judicial capacity, if he
ever encountered Christians at all, was far more likely to encounter
those who were unworthy of the name, than to become acquainted with the
meek, unworldly, retiring virtues of the calmest, the holiest, and the
best. When we have given their due weight to considerations such as
these we shall be ready to pardon Marcus Aurelius for having, in this
matter, acted ignorantly, and to admit that in persecuting Christianity
he may most honestly have thought that he was doing God service. The
very sincerity of his belief, the conscientiousness of his rule, the