Blessed are ye, when men shall hate you, and when they shall separate you from their company, and shall reproach you, and cast out your name as evil, for the Son of man's sake. An onlook into the yet distant future.
These words would be repeated by many a brave confessor in the days when persecution, at the hands of a far stronger and more far-reaching government than that of Jerusalem, should be the general lot of his followers.
We find from pagan writers of the next age that Christians were charged with plotting every vile and detestable crime that could be conceived against man-. kind (see, for instance, the historian Tacitus, 'Annal.
,' 15.44; Suetonius, 'Nero.,' 16).