Origen, and Cyprian were obliged to resist the pretensions of these ecclesiastics to authority outside their own Church, the first having to contend with Calixtus, and the three others with Stephen.[331] It was the Roman _Church_ that first displayed this activity and care; the Roman bishop sprang from the community in exactly the same way as the corresponding official did in other places.[332] In Irenaeus' proof from prescription, however, it is already the Roman _bishops_ that are specially mentioned.[333] Praxeas reminded the bishop of Rome of the authority of his predecessors ("auctoritates praecessorum eius") and it was in the character of _bishop_ that Victor acted. The assumption that Paul and Peter laboured in Rome, that is, founded the Church of that city (Dionysius, Irenaeus, Tertullian, Caius), must have conferred a high degree of prestige on her bishops, as soon as the latter officials were elevated to the position of more or less sovereign lords of the communities and were regarded as successors of the Apostles. The first who acted up to this idea was Calixtus. The sarcastic titles of "pontifex maximus," "episcopus episcoporum," "benedictus papa" and "apostolicus," applied to him by Tertullian in "de pudicitia" I. 13, are so many references to the fact that Calixtus already claimed for himself a position of primacy, in other words, that he associated with his own personal position as bishop the primacy possessed by the Roman Church, which pre-eminence, however, must have been gradually vanishing in proportion to the progress of the Catholic form of organisation among the other communities. Moreover, that is evident from the form of the edict he issued (Tert. I. c., I: "I hear that an edict has been issued and that a decisive one," "audio edictum esse praepositum et quidem peremptorium"), from the grounds it assigned and from the opposition to it on the part of Tertullian. From the form, in so far as Calixtus acted here quite independently and, without previous consultation, issued a _peremptory_ edict, that is, one settling the matter and immediately taking effect; from the grounds it assigned, in so far as he appealed in justification of his action to Matt. XVI. 18 ff.[334]--the first instance of the kind recorded in history; from Tertullian's opposition to it, because the latter treats it not as local, Roman, but as pregnant in consequences for all Christendom. But, as soon as the question took the form of enquiring whether the Roman _bishop_ was elevated above the rest, a totally new situation arose. Even in the third century, as already shown, the Roman community, led by its bishops, still showed the rest an example in the process of giving a political constitution to the Church. It can also be proved that even far distant congregations were still being bound to the Roman Church through financial support,[335] and that she was appealed to in questions of faith, just as the law of