Such was the idea of Christians about themselves from the beginning. The idea preceded the fact. The prophets foretold it; the Apostles proclaimed it:(272) let us observe the fulfilment of the prophecy and the proclamation. We will take our stand in the middle of the third century, when seven full generations have passed since the day of Pentecost. In this time a people has been formed. Already a hundred and fifty years before an eyewitness among themselves had observed the nature of this people. “Christians are not distinguished from other men either by country, or by language, or by customs: for they have no cities peculiar to themselves, nor any language different from others, nor singularity in their mode of life.... But they dwell both in Greek and in barbarous cities, as the lot of each may be, following local customs as to raiment and food, and the rest of their life, but exhibiting withal a polity of their own, marvellous and truly incredible. They dwell in their own country, but it is as sojourners; they share in everything as citizens, yet suffer everything as strangers. Every foreign land is to them a country, and every country a foreign land.... In a word, what the soul is in the body, that Christians are in the world. The soul is diffused through all the limbs of the body, and Christians through all the cities of the world.... The soul is shut within the body, of which it is the bond, and Christians are like a garrison in the world, which they hold together.”(273) Here a writer, calling himself a disciple of Apostles, describes to us, at the beginning of the second century, what the apostolic age of seventy years had wrought. He puts his finger just upon the marvel which we are contemplating. Fifty years later, at the moment the empire was culminating under the serene rule of Antoninus, a convert from heathenism, a philosopher who had spent his life in examining all the sects and races of the empire, and who afterwards became a martyr, said of Christians that being “quarried out of the side of Christ, they were the true Israelitic race,” “altogether being called the body, for both people and church, being many in number, are called by one name as one thing;” they are in fact “as one man before the Maker of all things, through the name of His first-born Son,” the High-priest gathering up first in the prophetical vision and then in the real fact “the true high-priestly race”(274) in His own Person. Thus Justin pointed out this conception of the Christian people to the Jew of his time as both foretold in prophecy and exhibited in fact. The longer that such a people as this endured, the greater would be the marvel.