So Suetonius speaks of the Christians as
being disturbers of the peace, and Tacitus, like a late writer in the
"Atlantic Monthly," refers to them as enemies of society.
It is true they finally became narrow-minded, intolerant, and almost
misanthropic, as always happens when a small minority are fatally
enclosed within an unfriendly community; but they were not so in the
beginning. Their methods were mild and pacific: they wished to influence
public-opinion, and even hoped to persuade the slaveholders to assist in
general emancipation. That the slave-holder should have been somewhat
irritated at this suggestion to part with so much valuable property is
not surprising; but why should it have disturbed their neighbors in
Massachusetts and Connecticut where the question of free and slave labor
had been agitated forty years before, and satisfactorily settled? The
same speakers who harangued against the abolitionists, would say in the
next breath that it was contrary to democratic principles for people in
one section of the country to concern themselves about the affairs of
those in another. Was it an inherited public tendency from the spirit of
intolerance which formerly persecuted the Quakers? However that may be,
it is an historical fact that great social reformers always have begun
in a similar manner, and their importance can fairly be measured by the
violence and duration of the opposition to them.
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