of the princes of this world knew, for if they had known it, they would never have crucified the Lord of Glory. But as it is written, That eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither hath it entered into the heart of man what things God hath prepared for them that love Him. But to us God hath revealed them by His Spirit."[193] Thus St. Paul wrote to some of his early converts about the year 50. The records which would have described by a continuous and detailed history the labours of the Apostles and their successors in the two centuries and a half which followed these words, have almost entirely perished. Their result subsists in the conversion of the Roman world, and the recognition of the kingdom of Christ by the kingdom of Cæsar. These words describe the process. We have no more to say than this, and no less. The Church has not to show in all this period great and renowned men among her members; she has not to show men distinguished for their science; she has not to show men who made themselves of mark in public life, who had wealth, or influential connections, or anything which makes power according to the natural constitution of the world.[194] Even her great writers were not yet come; of those whose writings have come down to us, Tertullian and Origen were her sole men of genius. Among those who sat in the chair of Peter, there had as yet arisen no one such as the great Leo, whose word was equal to the power which he swayed. Her schools of theology scarcely existed; no golden tongue among her preachers had yet spoken "with lips of flame;" no heathen rhetorician, converted in the middle of life, had become the great doctor for future ages, a fountain at once of philosophy and theology. She knew and she preached nothing but Jesus Christ and Him crucified, and the effect was that no such contrast exists in all history as that supplied by the weakness of that company, the number of whose names was about 120, who met to elect a successor to the traitor apostle, and the grandeur of that body represented by the 318 Fathers at Nicæa, on whom the majesty of the Roman people waited in the person of Constantine. For behind those Fathers was the Christian people, converts of every race, from the haughtiest patrician of Cornelian blood to the humblest slave of Egypt, who had heard and obeyed the call to believe on Jesus Christ and Him crucified. There had been ten generations of youths and maidens who had offered to Him the very flower of human beauty and superhuman purity; mothers who had surrendered their children, husbands who had lost both wives and children, bishops maimed, or one-eyed, for the love of Christ, who had laboured in mines, a host of missionaries who had been treated as "the offscourings of the world," all for the sake of that Crucified One, who was ever before their eyes, and in their hearts; to whom they were joined by suffering with Him, and who promised them, in recompense for those sufferings, that which eye hath