Excerpt from The Early Days of Christianity The world in which Christianity arose was almost entirely under the dominion of the Roman Empire. From about the middle of the third century before Christ, as a result of the wars with Carthage, the Roman rule had been gradually extended beyond the borders of Italy until the whole Mediterranean coast was under its control. At the death of the Emperor Augustus (14 A. D.) this vast empire, divided into provinces, stretched from the Atlantic Ocean on the west to the Euphrates River, the Arabian Desert, and the shores of the Red Sea on the east: and from the English Channel, the Rhine and the Danube Rivers and the Black Sea on the north to the Sahara Desert and the first cataract of the Nile on the South. The rest of the known world was made up of the uncivilized or savage tribes living north of the Rhine and the Danube, the nomads of the deserts south and east, the fierce and turbulent Parthians beyond the Euphrates, the inde pendent kingdom oi Armenia, and the remote and little-known lands of Ethiopia, India, and China. Thus the world in which Christianity arose - the known and civilized world of the west - was almost completely under Roman dominion. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.