Pliny the younger, in his letter to the Emperor Trajan, written from Bythinia between the years 106 and 112, is the first to mention the name of Christ. This mention is as of a God and not as of a man: no reference is made to Judea or to Jews; and the worshippers of this God he describes under the name of Christians, and as having long existed as a sect in that province. He writes as if he had heard nothing of the sect at Rome, and describes their worship as an excessive superstition. The passage in Tacitus is rejected, as not noticed by Eusebius or any one before the fifteenth century; that it was found in a copy by Johannes de Spire at Venice. This brings us to Justin Martyr, who can only be considered a Christian of the Platonic order, making no reference to Gospels or Epistles. Thence we come to St. Irenæus, Bishop of Lyons, who has very much the appearance of a Druidical Bishop rather than as a newly-appointed Christian Bishop. Irenæus mentions the four Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, and gives the reason why there should be four; as because there are four seasons in the year. He has many other allegorical extravagancies in his writings, and is not deemed the most respectable of the Fathers of the present Church. In the third century, and toward the latter part of that century, near three hundred years after the supposed birth of the man Jesus Christ, we have a recognition of all the Books in the New Testament, which received the stamp of the authority of a Council of Bishops, as a selection from many similar and dissimilar books under similar titles, in the fourth century; but whether the revelation of the mystery was then understood by the Bishops does not appear. The Epistles of the New Testament have no dates nor reference to any persons who were known to have lived at any particular time. They are not supported by, nor do they support, the Gospels. The idea of allegorism prevailed in the third century. The Christian era was not reduced to chronology until the sixth century; and that chronology was very little used or referred to until the tenth, that the era of the Hegira of Mahomet had come much into use. The real struggle of the present Christian Church was not with the Pagan but with the Mahometan Religion, and they are near a balance of numerical power to this day. A battle in France, in the reign of Charles Martel, checked the progress of the Mahometans, and saved the entire overthrow of the mysterious Christian Church on the continent of Europe. There was a much greater similarity between the Pagan and the Christian, than between the Christian and the Mahometan Religion.