political and social life, and a municipal government of their own, so had the Christian Faith in each of them a corresponding life of spiritual government and inward thought; and if we had the materials to construct the history of this Faith in any one, it would give us a wonderful insight into the course of that prodigious victory over the world which the whole result presents. We cannot do so. The data for it do not exist, and because they do not, we allude here to this first mode of growth made by the Christian Faith. Its second mode was thus. The Apostolical Churches, as they severally grew, scattered from their bosoms a seed as prolific as their own. They sent out those who founded communities such as their own. Thus the Christian plant was communicated from Rome to all the west. With every decade of years it crept silently over the vast regions of Gaul and Spain, advancing further west and north. This extension was not a chance springing up of Christians in different localities. It always took place by the founding(212) of sees, with the apostolic authority, after the apostolic model. If the Roman colonia had its rites of inauguration, and was a transcript of the great city, its senate and its forum, so much more the Christian city had its prototype and derived its authority from the great citadel of the Faith, wherein Peter’s prerogative was stored up,(213) and whence it had a derivation wider in extent and more ample in character than that of Rome the natural city. But we will take from another quarter what is as perfect a specimen of this extension as any that can be found. In the great city of Alexandria, the centre of intellectual and commercial life to all the East and the whole Greek name, S. Peter set up the chair of his disciple Mark. There the evangelist taught and there in due time suffered. Dragged by an infuriated populace through the streets he thus gave up his soul. But the plant which he so watered with his blood was of extraordinary vigour. It not only grew amid the intensest intellectual rivalry of Greek and Jew in the capital, but likewise in course of time occupied the whole civil government which obeyed the præfect of Egypt. From Alexandria, Egypt and the Pentapolis of Cyrene derived their Christian faith and government; and so powerful was this bond that the bishop of the capital exercised control over all the bishops of the civil diocese, as it was then termed. He was in power a patriarch long before he had that name, or even the name of archbishop. How great and strict this rule was we may judge from an incident preserved by Photius,(214) which occurred in the very last year of the period we are considering, in 235. Heraclas, bishop of Alexandria, a former pupil of Origen, had inflicted upon that great writer a second expulsion from the Church for his erroneous teaching. Origen on his way to Syria came to the city of Thmuis, where bishop Ammonius allowed him, in spite of the