The third century is that during which the Christian Church was making its way into every relation of life, and taking possession of human society. During this period it advances into full light, and becomes a manifest power. In the second century Celsus had attacked it as disclosed only to the yearning hearts of slaves, and fostered by the devotion of the weaker sex. At the distance of three generations Origen answered him, but the religion which he defended already stood avowed alike before the inquiring gaze of philosophers, the corrupt crowds of cities, and the jealous fear of rulers. Even in Rome, the sceptered head of idolatry, whose nobles the great political traditions of their city, and whose populace their sensual life, having its root in a false worship, made the most difficult to convert, the hated faith is known to have had public churches by the time of Alexander Severus, two hundred years after its first rise.(269) And much more everywhere else it had planted its foot openly on the soil of the empire. It is time, then, to view the Church as an institution offering the strongest contrast to the empire itself, to the barbarism which surrounded the empire, and to the sectarianism which was everywhere aspiring to counter-work and supplant that entire body of truth on some portion of which nevertheless it was all the time feeding. 1. And first the empire during this century presents itself to us in a most unwonted aspect. Septimius Severus having destroyed the rivals who competed with him for what was now become the great object of a successful general’s ambition, based his power avowedly on the sword. The secret of empire which he transmitted to his children was to foster and indulge the army, and to disregard all else. The senate, the representative of legal power, he despised and decimated. He died in 211, not before his eldest son had already lifted his hand against him, and the four princes of his house all perished by the sword, one by the hand of a brother, the other three by revolted soldiers. In the seventy-three years which elapse from his death to the accession of Diocletian twenty-five emperors are acknowledged at Rome, of whom twenty-three come to an end by violent deaths, almost always by insurrections of soldiers, under instigation of ambitious officers. Besides these, eight associates of the empire, and nineteen generals who during the reign of Gallienus assume the purple in various provinces, are all slain. During eighty-two years Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus, and Marcus, all at a mature time of life, adopted by the actual ruler to succeed, had governed a stable empire: but now it passes within a shorter period of time, the term of a single human life, nay a term in one case embraced by a single reign,(270) into twenty-five different hands. And indeed it seemed after the capture of the Emperor Valerian by the Persians, as if that great confederacy, which had just celebrated the thousandth