total and signal, the pretensions of one who had lately been exalted by the opinions of an adoring people to the character of a god, and had even received the solemn national sanction of this exaltation by a formal decree of the senate of Rome, confirmed by the absolute voice of the Caesar himself; and after such a victory, over such a person, be left long unnoticed in an obscure suburb. In accordance, therefore, with this reasonable notion, it is recorded in the continuation of the story, that when Peter, preaching at Rome, grew famous among the Gentiles, he was no longer allowed to occupy himself wholly among the Jews, but was thereafter taken by Pudens, a senator who believed in Christ, into his own house, on the Viminal Mount, one of the seven hills, but near the Jewish suburb. In the neighborhood of this house, as the legend relates, was afterwards erected a monument, called “the Shepherd’s,”――a name which serves to identify this important locality to the modern Romans to this day. Being thus established in these lordly patrician quarters, the poor Galilean fisherman might well have thought himself blessed, in such a pleasant change from the uncomfortable lodgings with which the royal Agrippa had lately accommodated him, and from which he had made so willing an exit. But the legend does the faithful and devoted apostle the justice, to represent him as by no means moved by these luxurious circumstances, to the least forgetfulness of the high commission which was to be followed through all sorts of self-denial,――no less that which drew him from the soft and soul-relaxing enjoyments of a patrician palace, than that which led him to renounce the simple, hard-earned profits of a fisherman, on the changeful sea of Gennesaret, or to calmly meet the threats, the stripes, the chains, and the condemned cell, with which the enmity of the Jewish magistrates had steadily striven to quench his fiery and energetic spirit. He is described as steadily laboring in the cause of the gospel among the Gentiles as well as the Jews, and with such success during the whole of the first year of his stay, that in the beginning of the following year he is said by papist writers to have solemnly and formally founded THE CHURCH OF ROME. This important fictitious event is dated with the most exact particularity, on the fifteenth of February, in the forty-third year of Christ, and the third year of the reign of the emperor Claudius. The empty, unmeaning pomposity of this announcement is a sufficient evidence of its fictitious character. According to the story itself, here Peter had been preaching nearly a whole year at Rome; and if preaching, having a regular congregation, of course, and performing the usual accompaniments of preaching, as baptism, &c. Now there is not in the whole apostolic history the least account, nor the shadow of a hint, of any such ceremony as the founding of a church, distinct from the mere