CHAPTER I
PERSECUTION FROM THE EARLIEST TIMES UP TO THE TIME OF THEODOSIUS
The first step to any kind of religious toleration in Europe was taken by Rome with the sole object of establishing a political compromise which should unite the heterogeneous elements of the Roman Empire. This achievement was rudely disturbed by Christianity, which implicitly and explicitly opposed the imperial system by creating in this world, and projecting into the next, an ideal and a society for which no sort of niche could be found in the State as then understood. But the advance of Christianity brought it into such close association with the Empire that for the time being the distinctive theory of its independence of political society was merged in the Roman theory of a state-religion. After a period of unstable equilibrium, in which the Empire attempted to preserve a neutral attitude, the old system revived, with the result that the pagans were persecuted just as the Christians had been. Not till the end of the eighteenth century did the Christian idea realise its true self on a large scale in the complete separation
