How can they say that the flesh which is nourished with the body of the Lord and with His blood goes to corruption and does not partake of life? Let them, therefore, either alter their opinion or cease from offering the things mentioned. But our opinion is in accordance with the eucharist, and the eucharist, in turn, establishes our opinion. For we offer to Him His own, announcing consistently the fellowship and union of the flesh and the Spirit. For as the bread which is produced from the earth when it receives the invocation of God is no longer common bread, but the eucharist, consisting of two realities, earthly and heavenly, so, also, our bodies, when they receive the eucharist, are no longer corruptible, having the hope of the resurrection unto eternity. Period IV. The Age Of The Consolidation Of The Church: 200 to 324 A. D. In the fourth period of the Church under the heathen Empire, or the period of the consolidation of the Church, the number of Christians increased so rapidly that the relation of the Roman State to the Church became a matter of the gravest importance (ch. 1). During a period of comparative peace and prosperity the Church developed its doctrinal system and its constitution (ch. 2). Although the school of Asia Minor became isolated and temporarily ceased to affect the bulk of the Church elsewhere, the school of the apologists was brilliantly continued at Alexandria under Clement and Origen, and later under Origen at Cæsarea in Palestine. Meanwhile the foundations were laid in North Africa for a distinctive type of Western theology, inaugurated by Tertullian and developed by Cyprian. After years of alternating favor and local persecutions, the first general persecution (ch. 3) broke upon the Church, rudely testing its organization and ultimately strengthening and furthering its tendencies toward a strictly hierarchical constitution. In the long period of peace that followed (ch. 4), the discussions that had arisen within the Church as to the relation of the divine unity to the divinity of Christ reached a temporary conclusion, the cultus was elaborated and assumed the essentials of its permanent form, and the episcopate was made supreme over rival authorities within the Church, becoming at once the expression and organ of ecclesiastical unity. At the same time new problems arose; within the Church there was the appearance of an organized asceticism which appeared for a time to be a rival to the Church’s system, and outside the Church the appearance of a hostile rival in the rapidly spreading Manichæan system, in which was revived, in a better organized and therefore more dangerous form, the expelled Gnosticism. The period ends with the last general persecution (ch. 5). Chapter I. The Political And Religious Conditions Of The Empire