The severe
expressions of Tacitus, _exitiabilis superstitio--odio humani generis
convicti_,[217] show how deeply the prejudices of the multitude imbued
the educated class also. One asks oneself with astonishment how a
doctrine so benign as that of Jesus Christ can have incurred
misrepresentation so monstrous. The inner and moving cause of the
misrepresentation lay, no doubt, in this,--that Christianity was a new
spirit in the Roman world, destined to act in that world as its
dissolvent; and it was inevitable that Christianity in the Roman world,
like democracy in the modern world, like every new spirit with a similar
mission assigned to it, should at its first appearance occasion an
instinctive shrinking and repugnance in the world which it was to
dissolve. The outer and palpable causes of the misrepresentation were,
for the Roman public at large, the confounding of the Christians with
the Jews, that isolated, fierce, and stubborn race, whose stubbornness,
fierceness, and isolation, real as they were, the fancy of a civilized
Roman yet further exaggerated; the atmosphere of mystery and novelty
which surrounded the Christian rites; the very simplicity of Christian
theism.
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