Three hundred years before the time of which we are speaking, one of Alexander’s royal successors, after erecting the temple of Serapis and the great Pharos, which last was numbered among the wonders of the world, bethought him of another way of rendering his name immortal, and gathered together a society of learned men whose duty was to consist in studying and teaching every known science. He built schools for them to lecture in, halls in which they ate in common, and marble porticoes, where, after the fashion of the Greek philosophers, they could walk and converse with their disciples. A noble library, which was enlarged by successive princes till it consisted of seven hundred thousand volumes, completed the Musæum or University of Ptolemy Soter, and the whole was joined to his own palace and delicious gardens by stately marble colonnades. Royal patronage was scarcely needed to foster the intellectual life of a city which had been designed by its founder to be the capital of the world; but with such encouragement the schools of Alexandria grew apace, and in the Apostolic age ranked as the first within the wide dominions that owned the Roman sway. Here then the Blessed Peter came in the person of his chosen disciple, to claim for Christ the southern capital of the Empire, as he had already in his own person taken possession of East and West--of Antioch and Rome. Solitary and unknown, the Evangelist came there bent on conquests vaster than those of Alexander, for he had but enslaved a base material world; but St. Mark, as he stood at the Mendion, or Moon-gate, that led from the harbour into the busy streets, was deliberating on the conquest of a million of souls. How was he to begin? Where should he first bear his message of good tidings? Should he bend his steps to the porticoes of the Musæum, or try to find a listener in the crowded exchange which met his eye through that open gate? Providence itself was to give the reply, and neither wealth nor science was to yield him his first convert. The thong of his sandal snapped in two, and to get it mended he entered the shop of a cobbler that stood close at hand. The cobbler, whose name was Anianus, gave him hospitality that night; and questioning him as to who he was, heard in reply that he was the servant of Jesus Christ, declared in the Scriptures to be the Son of God. “Of what Scriptures do you speak?” he inquired; “I have never heard of any writings but the Iliad and the Odyssey, and other such things as are taught to the sons of the Egyptians.” Then St. Mark sat down and unfolded to him the Gospel; through the long hours of the night, in the midst of that heaving world of idolatry and sin--the teacher spoke, and the disciple listened; and when morning dawned the first fruits of Alexandria had been laid up in the garner of Christ.[3]