SHORTLY AFTERWARDS,ANOTHER DISCIPLE BY THE NAME OF PETER WENT TO ROME TO VISIT THE SMALL COLONY OF CHRISTIANS ON THE BANKS OF THE TIBER.HE HIMSELF PERISHED DURING ONE OF THE MANY POGROMS ORGANISED BY THE EMPERORS WHEN THEY BEGAN TO FEAR THE INFLUENCE OF THIS NEW RELIGIOUS ORGANISATION.BUT THE CHURCH EASILY SURVIVED THOSE ATTACKS.THREE CENTURIES LATER,WHEN ROME CEASED TO BE THE POLITICAL CENTRE OF THE WESTERN WORLD,THE CHRISTIAN BISHOPS OF THE CITY MADE THEIR RESIDENCE THE SPIRITUAL CAPITAL OF THE ENTIRE WORLD
Of Peter,whose name is so closely connected with the change of our spiritual centre from Jerusalem to Rome,we know much less than we do of Paul.
We saw him last when in terrible distress he fled from the house of Caiaphas after he had just denied that he knew Jesus.Then we catch a glimpse of him at the crucifixion.Thereafter for many years we lose sight of him altogether,until he turns up as a very successful missionary,writing very interesting letters from distant cities whither he had travelled to preach the words of his Master.
A man of much less education than Paul,a simple fisherman from the Sea of Galilee,Peter lacked that personal magnetism which made Paul the dominating figure of every society in which he moved,whether Jewish or Greek or Roman or Cilician.
But his momentary cowardice at the trial of Jesus must not make us decide that Peter was lacking in courage.
Some of the bravest soldiers and some of the most famous regiments have done strange things at unexpected moments.Afterwards,however,when reason has come back,they have invariably made up for their sudden fall from grace by a renewed faithfulness to duty.
And so with Peter.
Besides,he was a man of parts who did a very useful piece of work in a very efficient manner.Being aware of his own limitations he left the more spectacular work to Paul,who spent his days abroad,and to James,the brother of Jesus,who had become the acknowledged head of the church in the old country.
Meanwhile,he contented himself with the less important countries on the outskirts of Judaea,and together with his faithful wife,he trudged the long roads from Babylon to Samaria and from Samaria to Antioch and told the people what Jesus had taught him in the old days when they fished together in the Sea of Galilee.
What finally brought him to Rome,we do not know.
In a strict historical sense,we have no reliable data upon this voyage of Peter.But the name of the apostle is so closely connected with the early development of the church as a worldwide institution,that we must devote a few words to this wonderful old man whom Jesus had loved beyond all others.
A chronicler who wrote in the middle of the second century mentions that Peter and Paul had worked in Rome at the same time and had been killed by the mob within a few months of each other.
Such wholesale killing of the heretics was a new departure in Roman history.
The former indifference of the Roman government toward the followers of Jesus was gradually beginning to turn into hatred.
As long as the Christians had been merely “queer people”who came together occasionally in obscure houses in equally obscure parts of the town to inspire each other with stories about a Messiah who had died the death of a runaway slave,no danger was to be feared from their meetings.
But as gradually the words of Christ began to reach more and more people,there was an end to the patience of the authorities.
It was the old,old story.
First of all,those who depended for their living upon the worship of Jupiter began to complain.They were losing money.The temples were being deserted.The Romans were giving all their gold to a foreign divinity of very obscure origin and the loss on the part of the cattle-dealers and the priests was very serious.
Having assured themselves of the cooperation of the police,the interested parties then began a campaign of slander against the Christians.The half-savage mob of disinherited peasants,living miserably in the suburbs,was delighted to hear such vile accusations against those of their neighbours who offended them by the decency of their conduct.These people winked at one another meaningly when one Roman housewife told another how “those Christians kill little children every Sunday and drink the blood,just to please their god,”and suggested that the time had come to “do something.”
It mattered little that all the reliable authors of that day agreed upon the saintliness of the lives of their Christian neighbours,and held them up as an example to those Romans who were for ever bewailing the disappearance of the “good old times”while practicing all the vices of the bad new days.
But there was still another and a more powerful group which from purely selfish motives feared the success of Christianity.The necromancers and the oriental mystics and the purveyors of a hundred new mysteries which they had only recently imported “exclusively”from the east,found that their business was being ruined.How could they hope to compete with a group of men and women who by preference lived in poverty and who refused to charge a single denarius for explaining the doctrines of their Galilean teacher?
All these different parties,inspired by greed,soon made common cause and went to the authorities and denounced the Christians as wicked and seditious criminals who were plotting against the safety of the Empire.
The Roman authorities were not easily frightened and for a long time they showed great unwillingness to take definite action.But the strange stories about the Christians continued to be repeated,first here and then there,and with such a wealth of detail that they seemed to be based upon solid fact.
Meanwhile the Christians themselves,in their zeal for a new and better world,helped those suspicions along by certain deep and dark references to the Day of Judgment when the entire planet was to be purged by the lightning from Heaven.