"Immediately in the reign of the Emperor Claudius, the most benign and man-loving providence of God conducted to Rome Peter, the great and powerful among the Apostles, who for his virtue was chosen to lead them all against Simon, the plague of mankind.[59] Peter, like a valiant commander of God's army, clothed in heavenly panoply, carried from the East to the West the precious freight of intellectual light, bearing the proclamation of the heavenly kingdom, to be the sure and saving word of souls." He records the martyrdom of the two Apostles, Peter and Paul, together at Rome under Nero, giving for this fact a fourfold testimony; of historians generally; of their tombs, which were still to be seen at Rome; of the presbyter Cains, who, at the beginning of the third century, appealed to the existence of these tombs, the one at the Vatican, the other on the Ostian Road, as a proof where "the sacred tabernacles of these Apostles had been deposited;" and lastly, to the letter of Dionysius, Bishop of Corinth in the middle of the second century, who spoke of their having both taught the Church of Corinth as well as that of Rome, and of both having suffered martyrdom together. "These particulars I have given," says Eusebius, "that the memory of the fact may be the more confirmed."[60] He gives carefully during two hundred years the descent of the bishops in these three Sees, and the number of years they sat—a tacit witness to the eminent rank of the three great Mother Sees established by Peter in the three chief cities of the Roman Empire; and an honour which he gives besides only to the Church of Jerusalem, since all, he says, have ever borne reverence "to the throne of the Apostle James, the first who received the episcopate of the city of Jerusalem from the Saviour Himself and the Apostles!" In another place he writes: "Again, when I consider the power of the Word, how the most populous churches were constructed by the rudest and most ignoble disciples of Jesus, not in obscure and unknown places, but founded in the most conspicuous cities, in very imperial Rome itself, in Alexandria and Antioch, for all Egypt and Libya, for Europe, and for Asia,—again I am compelled to search out the reason of this, and to confess that they could not have succeeded in so audacious an attempt except by some divine and superhuman power, and the working together with them of Him who said 'Make disciples all nations in My name.'"[61]