for the most part, preaching the word of God from place to place, appointing bishops to govern and manage the churches in their absence, and after their final departure, as their successors and substitutes; but no apostle is, on any occasion whatever, called a bishop in any part of the New Testament, or by any _early_ writer. The most important objection, however, to all this absurd account of Peter, as bishop of Rome, is the fact uniformly attested by those early fathers, who allude to his having ever visited that city, that having founded the church there, he appointed Linus the FIRST BISHOP,――a statement in exact accordance with the view here given of the office of a bishop, and of the mode in which the apostles constituted that office in the churches founded and visited by them. _The date of the foundation._――All this is announced with the most elaborate solemnity, in all the older papist writers, because on this point of the foundation of the Roman church by Peter, they were long in the habit of basing the whole right and title of the bishop of Rome, as Peter’s successor, to the supremacy of the church universal. The great authorities, quoted by them in support of this exact account of the whole affair, with all its dates, even to the month and day, are the bulls of some of the popes, enforcing the celebration of that day throughout all the churches under the Romish see, and the forms of prayer in which this occasion is commemorated even to this day. Moreover, a particular form is quoted from some of the old rituals of the church, not now in use, in which the ancient mode of celebrating this event, in prayer and thanksgiving, is verbally given. “Omnipotens sempiterne Deus, qui ineffabili sacramento, apostolo tuo Petro principatum Romae urbis tribuisti, unde se evangelica veritas per tota mundi regna diffunderet: praesta quaesumus, ut quod in orbem terrarum ejus praedicatione manavit, universitas Christiana devotione sequatur.”――“Almighty, eternal God, who by an ineffable consecration, didst give to thy apostle Peter the dominion of the city of Rome, that thence the gospel truth might diffuse itself throughout all the kingdoms of the world: grant, we pray, that what has flowed into the whole circuit of the earth by his preaching, all Christendom may devoutly follow.”――A prayer so melodiously expressed, and in such beautiful Latin, that it is a great pity it should have been a mere trick, to spread and perpetuate a downright, baseless lie, which had no other object than the extension of the gloomy, soul-darkening tyranny of the papal sway. Other forms of prayer, for private occasions, are also mentioned by Baronius, as commemorating the foundation of the church of Rome by Peter; and all these, as well as the former, being fixed for the fifteenth of February, as above quoted. Those records of fables, also, the old Roman martyrologies, are cited for evidence.