It would appear that the Apostles,[118] in carrying out the divine instructions of their Master for the establishment of His kingdom, followed His own example. Inasmuch as He had given them a head, they would appoint inferior heads in the Church who should hold an order among themselves in its administration, and all refer to the Superior. In doing this they had regard to the civil disposition of the empire, using it as a model upon which they formed the exterior polity of the Church. For just as in the civil and temporal government of each province there was a mother city, the prefect of which administered the whole province, ruling under the Prince over the subordinate governors, to whom matters of more grave importance were referred, so the Apostles and their disciples after them instituted in the chief cities bishops to whom they gave all the powers of metropolitans before the name came into use, in order that ecclesiastical regulations of the greatest moment might be treated before them in union with the bishops of their respective provinces.[119] Thus St. Paul, finding Ephesus the metropolis of Proconsular Asia, placed Timotheus to be bishop there, giving him at the same time jurisdiction over the bishops of that province, who should be drawn as it were out of the womb of the parent See; and in his first letter we find instructions as to the quality of the bishops whom he should select. In the 19th chapter of the Acts, we are told that St. Paul had drawn a great number of disciples to him, not only at Ephesus, but in nearly every part of Asia, that is, the proconsular province of that name. In the 17th chapter, at a later date, he summoned at Miletus the bishops of Ephesus and its province to meet him, calling them "all you among whom I have passed preaching the kingdom of God," which words denote that he was speaking, not to the priests of one city, but to the bishops of a province, in which "the Holy Ghost had set them as bishops to rule over the church of God." St. Irenæus also notes that they were bishops and elders from Ephesus and the adjoining cities. St. John recognises these bishops in the seven letters which he is ordered to communicate to the angels of the churches in the Apocalypse. At the head of these is the Angel of the church of Ephesus as metropolis. So, again, the Apostle Paul set Titus as metropolitan over the whole of Crete, expressly ordering him to establish bishops in every city, and describing what their character should be. His letters to Corinth and to Thessalonica, as well as to Ephesus, are letters to cities each of which was a metropolis. Thus the 34th of the Canons, called apostolical, runs: "It behoves the bishops of each nation to recognise him, who is the first among them, and to esteem him as their head, and to do nothing of importance without his sentence; but let each of them do only what concerns his own diocese and the places belonging to it, and not that