When the Roman Emperor Nero used the weapon of intolerance to persecute the Christians that were worshiping one God, he used an instrument that had been fashioned in the furnace of ignorance and indolence. Since ignorance always fears, and indolence is love of ease, his refusal to tolerate anything that opposed his mode of belief is proof that he feared the enlightenment which would necessarily destroy the thing that to him meant life, pleasure in matter. That the early Christians won converts to Christianity was reason enough for profligate Rome to attempt their destruction. The Romans like Herod in earlier years when he sought the child Jesus to slay him, realized that if this Christianity spread far enough it would destroy their indolent and sensuous belief in matter as a reality. It meant freedom for the slaves, elimination of political extravagance, and the end of that Roman pastime, the combat of gladiators with all its attendant vices.
The ignorance of intolerance displayed by Nero was manifested in notorious cruelty, in persecutions and animality, traits still displayed by the mortal of to-day. While the mind of the mortal, or the mind of the flesh, has not become any less material, it has put on other garments, has dropped the covering of physical persecutions to some extent, and taken on the cloak of mental persecution, or mental evil. This would-be mind, the direct reverse of the divine Mind which is God, is in this age fighting for the continuation of its vices. It is still intolerant; it wants to be drunken, licentious and most of all, it does not want men to do any thinking for themselves.
The Christians of olden days were thinkers: the Christians of to-day are thinkers, and it is the clear thinker that mortal mind hates. A thinker will ultimately reason his way out of the belief of life in matter, and this is exactly what the Christians were doing in Nero's time and are doing in our day. It is clear thinking that brings about such reforms as the prohibition of intoxicating liquor, the destruction of the drug traffic, and freeing of slaves. So, the mortal mind cries that its liberty is interfered with in the prohibition of its evils, and then while it shouts liberty on the one hand it breaks the law on the other. Just as the truths of the divine Mind are continuous and indestructible, so this false claim of mind claims to be continuous. Not being intelligent, it must be ignorant, and this lack of knowledge is displayed in its betrayal of itself when striving to betray the truth which is above it. By calling for the law on its neighbor, it brings the law on itself. Being only the opposite of good it always remains that contradiction, and therein lies its nothingness and powerlessness.
