of the Virgin, at a later period in the history of the church, was the means by which the Christ of Paul was made the Son of God in the sense of the Alexandrian school. The transition of the Therapeutæ to Christianity was easy. Little or no change was made in the form of the services in the church. According to Eusebius, they sang hymns. They read sacred books and made comments on them as well after as before the change. Like the first Christian community, they held all their property in common. They said grace at table both before and after meals, according to Josephus, which they continued to do after they took the name of Christians. They made no change in their fasts and festivals, and retained the monasteries. The transfer of the form of the Therapeutæ church government to the new church was the work of time, and was not fully effected until the second century. The influence of Paul's name, with other causes, was too strong during the first to permit the change. A Bishop in a Christian church is the work of the second century. Like every other new feature in its history, we find the first Bishop at Alexandria. Gibbon says: "The extensive commerce of Alexandria, and its proximity to Palestine, gave an easy entrance to the new religion. It was at first embraced by great numbers of the Therapeutæ, or Essenians of the lake Mareotis, a Jewish sect which had abated much of its reverence for the Mosaic ceremonies. The austere life of the Essenians, their fasts and excommunications, the community of goods, the love of celibacy, their zeal for martyrdom, and the warmth though not the purity of their faith, already offered a very lively image of the primitive discipline. It was in the school of Alexandria that the Christian theology appears to have assumed a regular and scientific form; and when Hadrian visited Egypt he found a church, composed of Jews and of Greeks, sufficiently important to attract the notice of that inquisitive prince." (Ch. xv. (162) (163), vol. I. p. 283.)* * After the author had written out his views as above, he met with the following passages from the writings of Michaelis, the great German critic, quoted in Taylor's Diegesis. Of the Therapeutæ, he says they are a "Jewish sect, which began to spread itself at Ephesus, and to threaten great mischief to Christianity in the time (or indeed previous to the time) of St. Paul, on which account, in his epistles to the Ephesians, to the Colossians, and to Timothy, he declares himself openly against them." (Diegesisy 58.)