From Nero to Constantine, two hundred and fifty years, there were ten general persecutions; Christianity, the Catholic Church, was made the object of unending hatred. And yet new Christians were recruited from every class and condition of society. These facts are all the more strange if we recall the barbara ity of the tortures undergone by these martyrs of Christ, the calmness and gentleness that each one displayed in the midst of sufferings. Despite two and a half centuries of bloodshed and the millions of deaths that were the result of profession of faith in Jesus Christ, there was practically no part of the then known world where Christianity was not found. At the time of Constantine's proclamation in the beginning of the fourth century there were over 1,500 bishops of the, Catholic Church, 850 in the East and 650 in the West.
Thus, Professor Robinson's contention that the growth of the new religion was gradual until its effective acceptance by Constantine, is adequately refuted, Actually, Constantive did little more than make an official declaration of what was already practically a fact, namely, that Christianity was so well established in the Empire as to have just about superseded all other forms tf worship. The other contention of Professor Robinson that the religion of Mohammed spread with miraculous rapidity has been neatly answered by Pascal: "If Mohammed chose the means of succeeding humanly, it must be said that Jesus Christ chose the means of perishing humanity.
History has the same story to tell about the period of the barbarian invasion of the Empire that soon followed. When the force of the storm was spent and Europe recovered consciousness, she found devastation in place of civilization. When the Church staggered to her foot and looked around, she found the Eternal City a ruin and all Europe filled with looting hordes of barbarians. Her first task was not to Christianize these savages but to civilize them. And it is another miracle of Christianity's growth and influence that these barbarians who overran Europe from the 4th to the 7th centuries were so far civilized and Christianized by the 12th and 13th centuries that never before nor since have w had such a well-founded society when the nations were unified because Christian, Such has always been the triumphal growth and progress of Christian-
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.