Note 82 — BOOK II THE LIFE OF A CHRISTIAN IN THE EARLY DAYS OF THE FAITH
Reading edition
The edicts favourable to Christianity were quietly received, even approved, in many places warmly welcomed; and vast and ever increasing numbers of the population, hitherto pagans, joined the Christian communities.
The enormous and seemingly sudden increase in the number of Christians in the Roman Empire in the latter years of the third and in the fourth centuries, is a problem which even now is something of a mystery to some historians.