We see, then, the two forces of the Primacy and the Episcopate coexist at the end of this first great stadium of the Church's course, as they coexisted on the Day of Pentecost. It is precisely when setting forth the testimony given to the one Christian faith against all heresy by the churches as established throughout the world, especially those which had Apostles for founders, that Irenæus, a hundred years after St. Peter's death, dwelt upon this bond of the one Episcopate, "that necessity by which, on account of its superior principate, every Church, that is the faithful everywhere, were bound to agree with the Roman Church." The two great Fathers, one the glory of the East, as the other of the West, Chrysostom and Augustine, born within a few years of each in the middle of the fourth century, and thus placed at a period sufficiently near, and yet not too near to contemplate the whole course of the Church during her conflict with the Roman Empire, both speak in numberless passages and in enthusiastic words of the wonder of the Catholic Church spread in all lands. The wonder was increased by the existence of heresies and schisms, which seemed by force of contrast the better to delineate the form of the one Spouse of Christ. St. Epiphanius and St. Augustine himself had recorded a number of these when that notable sentence of the great Father, "The judgment of the whole world is a safe one," which has passed into a proverb, was pronounced against the Donatists. What was the marvel which especially convinced their minds and touched their hearts? The Roman Empire, as they still saw it and lived in it, was, in fact, a vast confederation of many peoples, lands, and religions: the only unity which it possessed, amid endless varieties and contradictions, was that unity of civil government which Roman discipline, energy, and valour had so long maintained; which, the one of African the other of Hellenic race, equally felt and appreciated. This is the greatness especially of the imperial period. Now, springing up in the midst of this endless variety, this most profuse and party-coloured polytheism, this antagonism and rivalry of countless races, and no less in the light of a proud, refined, and most ancient, if also most corrupt, civilisation, they saw the establishment of one uniform government, bearing in its bosom one uniform religion, carried on through ten generations of men, and accomplished after manifold persecutions. They saw the religion and the government start together from the Person of one who claimed to be the Son of God, while He certainly died, as a malefactor would be condemned to die, upon the cross. They saw the religion and the government carried on in the second degree by twelve men, poor, illiterate, and powerless. And before their own time their fathers had told them how the chief of this mighty empire had bowed his head before the religion and the government springing from One who hung