whose echoes now floated from Christian lips over the dark waters of the Nile.[5] The Holy Gospels, the Creed, the Liturgy, and the Ecclesiastical Chant, these were the contributions which were offered by the Patriarch of Alexandria to her learned stores, and which formed the first class-books of the Christian schools. But St. Mark did something more than this. All early writers agree in declaring that he established among his clergy that canonical rule of life which was a copy of the community life of the first Christians; while at the same time, as St. Jerome and Cassian[6] inform us, some of his disciples retiring into the neighbourhood of the city, and there giving themselves up to prayer and the study of the Scriptures, laid the first foundations of the cœnobitical, or monastic life. To St. Mark, therefore, and through him to the Prince of the Apostles, may be traced up every one of those institutions which were the nurseries of the Christian schools. For, as will hereafter be seen, the Christian seminaries took their origin in the episcopal and monastic schools, and these again grew out of that system of community life which, being first embraced by the faithful at Jerusalem, was afterwards elsewhere established by the Apostles, who lived with their immediate followers as they themselves had lived with their Divine Master. The Apostolic origin of the canonical rule of life has never been denied. When St. Augustine was accused by Petilianus the Donatist of introducing a novelty into the Church by establishing his community of regular clergy, he defended himself by appealing to the example of the first Christians, and showing that, if the name of monastery were new, the manner of life which he and his brethren followed was as old as Christianity itself. It is thus that the author of the ancient book called the “Recognitions” describes St. Peter as living, with a chosen number of disciples, among whom were St. Mark, St. Clement, St. Evodius, and St. Linus; so St. Paul was accompanied by St. Luke and St. Timothy, and St. John the Evangelist by St. Polycarp and St. Papias. St. Irenæus, a disciple of the last-named saints, carried into Gaul the discipline of the school in which he had been nurtured, and, writing in after years to the heresiarch Florinus, reminds him how, when yet a child, he had been accustomed to meet him in the house of Polycarp. “Early recollections,” he says, “grow with the soul, and entwine themselves about it, so that I could tell of the very place where the blessed Polycarp sat when he spoke, of his employments and his external appearance.”[7]