He lacked moral, as he did physical courage. At Damascus he did not hesitate to sit at the same table with the uncircumcised, when there was no one present to object; but when those came from Jerusalem who could not tolerate the liberal ideas of Paul on circumcision, he cowardly sneaked away. Paul took fire at the appearance of so much meanness, and boldly reproved him. Is this the kind of man who would enter the lion's den, and brave the wrath of Nero at a time when the tyrant was flooding the streets of Rome with the blood of Christians? Justin Martyr was born about the year A. D. 100, and was a native of Neapolis in Syria. (Apology, sec. I.) At the beginning of the reign of Antoninus Pius he fixed his abode in Rome, and afterwards wrote numerous works, principally devoted to the defence of Christians. (Cave's _Life of Martyr_, vol. 2, chap. 6.) No one had better opportunities of knowing about Peter, and the church at Rome, than he had, and no one who wrote as much as he did which concerned Christianity, would have been more likely to mention him, if what Irenæus says of him had been true. He is so oblivious of Peter that he seems to have been unconscious of his existence. No writer in the first years of the second century, who is entitled to credit, speaks of him, and he first begins to figure in the pages of Irenæus when the disputes with the Gnostics were at their height. The Clementines were composed later in the century, when Pauline Christianity was giving way to the new school, and the dogma of an Apostolic succession had taken possession of the church. Dionysius, Bishop of Corinth, who lived and wrote during the reign of Marcus Antoninus and his son Commodus, about A. D. 180, according to Eusebius, also states that Paul and Peter were at Rome together engaged in laying the foundation of a church. (Eusebius, Ecc. Hist., lib. ii. ch. 25.) But this writer has got out of the Pauline period, and even goes beyond Irenæus, for he states, according to the same authority, that Peter and Paul laid the foundation of the church at Corinth. Theophilus of Antioch, Melito of Sardis, Apollinarius of Hierapolis, all writers about the same time, A. D. 180, like Irenæus, take sides against the Gnostics, and show that they were committed to the new school. From this time Irenæus is quoted as the authority for the fact that Peter and Paul had founded the church at Rome, and we are asked to give special weight to what he says, as he was the companion of Polycarp, who had seen and conversed with John.