Origen’s brilliant career, like the career of all great men, was not allowed to end without its trials. Aside from the assaults of the professed enemies of the church, he met with severe annoyances from the jealousy of those whose interests he had studied to further. The trouble came from a quarter he least expected. Demetrius, Bishop of Alexandria, during the early part of his episcopate entertained for Origen the highest esteem; and there is no ostensible motive to believe that Origen, throughout all his relations with the patriarch, gave him any cause of offence, or else this prelate would not have retained him in the presidency of his theological school till the year 230—a period of twenty‐ seven years. The humility of the regent and his innate respect for authority held his tongue in silence, whatever may have been his opinion of the conduct of Demetrius as a prelate. Still, we may conjecture Demetrius was not far from the mind of Origen when, in speaking of disorders and irregularities in the church, he wrote of bishops: “We would almost have guards like kings; we make ourselves terrible and difficult of access, chiefly to the poor; we treat them who speak with us and ask for some favor in a manner which the most cruel tyrants and governors would not assume towards suppliants.”(54) It is not wrong to look upon Demetrius as a man who consulted with the general interests of Christianity his own popularity, the extension of his diocese, and the increase of his subjects; perhaps he was of the opinion that the advancement of religion in Alexandria and its suffragan dependencies, his own juridical district, was of more importance than its dissemination in other places. It was interested motives of this sort that led him to disapprove of Origen’s evangelical missions, by which his invaluable services were temporarily withdrawn from his native city. Origen, being a layman, free from any obligations to Demetrius, except in a spiritual point of view, possessed the individual right of travelling from country to country, and of delivering lectures without the permission of any authority. If he spoke before the congregations of the faithful, it was only at the urgent solicitation of the prelates, whose jurisdiction within their respective provinces was recognized and unquestioned; champion of the faith in the East, he was waited upon by delegations from pious bishops, entreating him to come to their dioceses. Those missions Origen, in his love for the glory of God, felt conscientiously bound to perform. On a journey to crush by his eloquence the heresy of the Valentinians, that had made lamentable ravages in Greece, he paid a visit to S. Alexander of Jerusalem and Theoctistus of Cæsarea, by whom he was ordained priest. This act, irreprehensible in itself, entailed upon Origen serious difficulties, and became the groundwork upon which his enemies fabricated the most severe accusations.