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_,