It was the time when those who had lived and walked with the Apostles had passed away, and when the third generation of the Church's rulers was already growing old. St. Irenaeus was near his glorious end; St. Eleutherius, of memory dear to Britain, had just closed his pontificate by martyrdom, and St. Victor sat in his place. The echoes of the voice of Peter had hardly died out in Rome and Antioch; the traditions of Paul's bodily presence were yet living in Asia, in Greece, and the Islands; and the sweet odor of John's life still hung about the places where his sojourning had been: many a church of Greece and Egypt and of the far East had the sepulchre of its founder, an Apostle or an apostolic man, round which to pray. It was the age of the persecutions, and the age of the apologies. In every {38} city that was coming about which from the first had been inevitable. The Church was laying hold of human learning, and setting it to do her own work. In fixing upon Alexandria as the spot where, at this period, the contest between Christian science and Gentile learning, Gentile ignorance and Gentile brute force, was most interesting and most developed, we must pass by many other Churches, not in forgetfulness, though in silence. We must pass by Rome, the capital of the world, not because there were not learned men there whom Jesus Christ had raised up to battle with heathen philosophy; for it was but a few years since Justin Martyr had shed his blood for the faith, and Apollonius from his place in the senate had spoken his "apology" for his fellow Christians. But the enemies which the Gospel had to meet at Rome were not so much the learning and science of the heathen as his evil passions and vicious life; and the sword of persecution, at Rome hardly ever sheathed, kept down all attempts at regularity or organization in public teaching. We must pass by Athens, still the intellectual capital of the world, not because there were not at Athens also worthy doctors of the wisdom of the cross--witness, to the contrary, Athenagoras, the Christian philosopher, who presented his apology to Marcus Aurelius. But Athens, though at the end of the second century and long afterward she was the mother of orators, poets, and philosophers, seems to have been too thoroughly steeped in the sensuous idolatry of Greece to have harbored a school of Christianity by the side of the Porch and the Lyceum. If the same was true of Athens then as a century afterward, her smooth-tongued, "babbling" sophists, and her pagan charms, must have had to answer for the soul of many a poor Christian youth that went to seek learning and found perdition. We pass by Carthage, in spite of Tertullian's great name; Antioch, notwithstanding Theophilus, whose labors against the heathen still bore fruit; Sardis, in spite of Melito, then just dead, but living still in men's mouths by the fame of his learning, eloquence, and miracles; and Hierapolis, in spite of Apollinaris, who,