them; but, in order to get at the entire truth, put some of them to the torture, and ultimately adjourned their trial [see ante, pp. 203-205].  The manner in which Greek and Latin writers mention the Christians goes far to show that they were guilty of the atrocious crimes laid to their charge.  Suetonius (in Nero) calls them, ‘A race of men of new and villainous superstition’ [see ante, p. 201].  The Emperor Adrian, in a letter to his brother-in-law, Servianus, in the year 134, as given by Vospicius, says:  ’There is no presbyter of the Christians who is not either an astrologer, a soothsayer, or a minister of obscene pleasures.’  Tacitus tells us that Nero inflicted exquisite punishment upon those people who, under the vulgar appellation of Christians, were held in abhorrence for their crimes.  He also, in the same place, says they were ‘odious to mankind;’ and calls their religion a ‘pernicious superstition’ [see ante, p. 99].  Maximus, likewise, in his letter, calls them ‘votaries of execrable vanity,’ who had ’filled the world with infamy.’  It would appear, however, that owing to the extreme measures taken against them by the Romans, both in Italy and in all the provinces, the Christians, by degrees, were forced to abandon entirely in their Agapae infant murders, together with every species of obscenity, retaining, nevertheless, some relics of them, such as the kiss of charity, and the bread and wine, which they contended was transubstantiated into real flesh and blood....  A very common way of repelling these charges was for one sect of Christians, which, of course, denounced all other sects as heretics, to urge that human sacrifices and incestuous festivals were not celebrated by that sect, but that they were practised by other sects; such, for example, as the Marcionites and the Capocratians. (Justin Mart., ‘Apology,’ i., 35; Iren., adv.  Haer. i., 24; Clem.  Alex., i., 3.) When Tertullian joined the Montanists, another sect of Christians, he divulged the criminal secrets of the Church which he had so zealously defended, by saying, in his ‘Treatise on Fasting,’ c. 17, that ’in the Agapae the young men lay with their sisters, and wallowed in wantonness and luxury’....  Remnants of these execrable customs remained for a long time, and vestiges of them exist to this very day, as well in certain words and phrases as in practice.  The communion table to this very day is called the altar, the name of that upon which the ancients sacrificed their victims.  The word sacrament has a meaning, as used by Pliny already cited, which carries us back to the solemn oath of the Agapaeists.  The word mass carries us back still further, and identifies the present mass with that of the Pagans....  Formerly the consecrated bread was called host, which word signifies a victim offered as sacrifice, anciently human very often....  Jerome and other Fathers called the communion bread—­little body, and the communion table—­mystical