he was become an enemy to all mankind.  And I think that, according to the account which Tacitus has given of Nero’s inhumane treatment of the Christians at Rome, in the tenth year of his reign, what he did then was not owing to their having different principles in religion from the Romans, but proceeded from a desire he had to throw off from himself the odium of a vile action—­namely, setting fire to the city—­which he was generally charged with.  And Sulpicius Severus, a Christian historian of the fourth century, says the same thing” ("Credibility of the Gospel History,” vol. i., pages 416-420).  Lardner, however, allows that the Jews persecuted the Christians where they could although they were unable to slay them.  They probably persecuted them much in the same fashion that the Christians have persecuted Freethinkers during the present century.

But Paley adduces further the evidence of Clement, Hermas, Polycarp, Ignatius, and a circular letter of the Church of Smyrna, to prove the sufferings of the eye-witnesses ("Evidences,” pages 52-55).  When we pass into writings of this description in later times, there is, indeed, plenty of evidence—­in fact, a good deal too much, for they testify to such marvellous occurrences, that no trust is possible in anything which they say.  Not only was St. Paul’s head cut off, but the worthy Bishop of Rome, Linus, his contemporary (who is supposed to relate his martyrdom), tells us how, “instead of blood, nought but a stream of pure milk flowed from his veins;” and we are further instructed that his severed head took three jumps in “honour of the Trinity, and at each spot on which it jumped there instantly struck up a spring of living water, which retains at this day a plain and distinct taste of milk” ("Diegesis,” pp. 256, 257).  Against a mass of absurd stories of this kind, the only evidence of the persecution of Paley’s eye-witnesses, we may set the remarks of Gibbon:  “In the time of Tertullian and Clemens of Alexandria the glory of martyrdom was confined to St. Peter, St. Paul, and St. James.  It was gradually bestowed on the rest of the Apostles by the more recent Greeks, who prudently selected for the theatre of their preaching and sufferings some remote country beyond the limits of the Roman Empire” ("Decline and Fall,” vol. ii., p. 208, note).  Later there was, indeed, more persecution; but even then the martyrdoms afford no evidence of the truth of Christianity.  Martyrdom proves the sincerity, but not the truth, of the sufferer’s belief; every creed has had its martyrs, and as the truth of one creed excludes the truth of every other, it follows that the vast majority have died for a delusion, and that, therefore, the number of martyrs it can reckon is no criterion of the truth of a creed, but only of the devotion it inspires.  While we allow that the Christians underwent much persecution, there can be no doubt that the number of the sufferers has been grossly exaggerated.  One can scarcely