published, some Christians — apparently renegades, who abjured Christianity when challenged by Pliny—asserted that either they or the Christians generally gave up either the practice of meeting for a common meal or their religious meetings also. It is improbable that those who persisted in their wicked and immoderate superstition should have abandoned their weekly assemblies at which they recited a hymn to Christ as God, but it is unnatural to distinguish between these assemblies and the subsequent meetings for the common meal, and the statement of the renegades may reasonably be confined to their own obedience to the edict. \
Professor Ramsay, however, infers from Pliny’s language that the statement refers to the Christians as a whole: “They had, indeed, been in the habit of holding social meetings, and feasting in common; but this illegal practice they had abandoned as soon as the governor had issued an edict in accordance with the Emperor’s in- structions, forbidding the formation or existence of sodalitates”} And he asserts that Pliny’s language implies a distinction between the illegal meetings of the evening and the legal meetings of the morning: “The regular morning meetings which Pliny speaks about and which, as we know, must have been weekly meetings, were not abandoned, and Pliny obviously accepts them as strictly legal. Amid the strict regulations about societies the Roman government ex- pressly allowed to all people the right of meeting for purely religious purposes. The morning meeting of the Christians was religious; but the evening meeting was social, including a common meal, and therefore constituted the Christian community a sodalitas. The Christians abandoned the illegal meeting, but continued the legal one. This fact is one of the utmost consequence. It shows that the Christian communities were quite alive to the necessity of acting according to the law, and of using the forms of the law to screen themselves as far as was consistent with their principles.” 2
Against this view it must be urged, in the first place, that the common meal of the Christian community had a definitely religious character and could not be abandoned without a breach of their principles; and, in the second place, that Pliny’s language is by no means so explicit and clear as is suggested. The authors of the, statement are a large number of persons accused of Christianity, either by an anonymous letter or by an informer: all of them convinced Pliny that they had never been Christians, or had ceased to be Christians, by offering sacrifice to idols and blas-
1The Church in the Roman Empire, p. 206. 2 Tbid. pp. 219 f. VOL. V. 2