passages of ancient writers.  We have already seen the violent expressions of hatred which the ardent and high-toned soul of Tacitus thought applicable to the Christians; and such language is echoed by Roman writers of every character and class.  The fact is that at this time and for centuries afterwards the Romans regarded the Christians with such lordly indifference that—­like Festus, and Felix and Seneca’s brother Gallio—­they never took the trouble to distinguish them from the Jews.  The distinction was not fully realized by the Pagan world till the cruel and wholesale massacre of the Christians by the pseudo-Messiah Barchochebas in the reign of Adrian opened their eyes to the fact of the irreconcilable differences which existed between the two religions.  And pages might be filled with the ignorant and scornful allusions which the heathen applied to the Jews.  They confused them with the whole degraded mass of Egyptian and Oriental impostors and brute-worshippers; they disdained them as seditious, turbulent, obstinate, and avaricious; they regarded them as mainly composed of the very meanest slaves out of the gross and abject multitude; their proselytism they considered as the clandestine initiation into some strange and revolting mystery, which involved as its direct teachings contempt of the gods, and the negation of all patriotism and all family affection; they firmly believed that they worshipped the head of an ass; they thought it natural that none but the vilest slaves and the silliest woman should adopt so misanthropic and degraded a superstition; they characterized their customs as “absurd, sordid, foul, and depraved,” and their nation as “prone to superstition, opposed to religion.” [48] And as far as they made any distinction between Jews and Christians, it was for the latter that they reserved their choicest and most concentrated epithets of hatred and abuse.  A “new,” “pernicious,” “detestable,” “execrable,” superstition is the only language with which Suetonius and Tacitus vouchsafe to notice it.  Seneca,—­though he must have heard the name of Christian during the reign of Claudius (when both they and the Jews were expelled from Rome, “because of their perpetual turbulence, at the instigation of Chrestus,” as Suetonius ignorantly observed), and during the Neronian persecution—­never once alludes to them, and only mentions the Jews to apply a few contemptuous remarks to the idleness of their sabbaths, and to call them “a most abandoned race.”

[Footnote 46:  2 Cor. viii. 2.]

[Footnote 47:  [Greek:  Echleuazon], Acts xvii. 32.  The word expresses the most profound and unconcealed contempt.]

[Footnote 48:  Tac. Hist. i. 13:  ib. v. 5:  JUV. xiv. 85:  Pers. v. 190, &c.]

The reader will now judge whether there is the slightest probability that Seneca had any intercourse with St. Paul, or was likely to have stooped from his superfluity of wealth, and pride of power, to take lessons from obscure and despised slaves in the purlieus inhabited by the crowded households of Caesar or Narcissus.