It was meet that an Evangelist should deliver his first message to the poor; but it was not with the poor alone that he had to do. The Church of Alexandria was to receive into her embrace the philosopher of the Musæum as well as the despised Egyptian slave. She was to address herself to the wise and prudent of this world as well as to little ones. So St. Mark, as we are told, surrounded his see with learned men, and became the founder of a catechetical school. Although its chief celebrity dates only from the end of the second century, yet its first foundation is universally attributed to St. Mark. It rose under the shadow of the temple of Serapis, near those marble porticoes where the Neo-Platonists, who despised such vulgar idolatry, were dreaming of some misty impersonal abstraction to which they gave the name of God; where Pyrrhonists took refuge in a system of universal doubt; where many were content to know nothing at all about the soul, and concerned themselves rather with mathematics and material prosperity; where Greek Epicureans talked of a world that had made itself by chance, and set up sense as the standard of certainty, and enjoyment as the end of life; while Roman freethinkers quoted the witty atheisms of Lucretius, and then went to burn incense before the statue of the Emperor. What new elements of knowledge could a Christian Evangelist contribute to such a world as this? There was no need for him to bring it the literature of Greece and Rome; and as to the sciences of figures and numbers, Egypt was their native soil. Even the Hebrew Scriptures had long ago been translated into Greek and laid up in the library of Ptolemy. But he brought the Gospel--his own Gospel in particular;[4] the one Book out of which for long ages the faithful of Alexandria were exclusively instructed, and which the teacher of the catechetical school was required to hold in his hand when he stood before his hearers. He brought the traditions of St. Paul and of St. Peter, for he had been the disciple of both. He brought the Creed, the Apostolic symbol, which in the brief compass of its twelve articles contains more truths than Plato or Cicero had ever known, and which discovered in the certainty of faith that _Eureka_ which every system of human philosophy had sought in vain. He brought his Liturgy too; if not that which bears his name, at least some earlier form which served as its groundwork. And lastly, he brought that Liturgy’s musical voice--the eight ancient tones, which, like so many things that belong to the Church, when first we meet with them in history, are already clothed with venerable antiquity: those tones to which the Jewish Church had for centuries chanted the Psalms of David; which must so often have fallen on the ears of Jesus, and in whose melody, it may be, His Divine Voice had sometimes mingled; the sweet songs of Sion which Jewish captives had sung by the rivers of Babylon, and