A hundred years after this, Origen uses the same language and points to the same marvel. He had in the year 249, at the entreaty of a friend and pupil, set himself in the maturity of life, and of a renown which filled the Church as no man’s before had filled it, to answer the attack of a heathen philosopher, Celsus, upon Christianity. He was writing just at the end of the longest period of peace which is found during those three centuries. From the death of the Emperor Septimius Severus in 211 to that of the Emperor Philip in this year 249, there had been, with the exception of a short attack from Maximin, to which his death put a stop, no general persecution of Christians. Thus thirty-eight years had passed of such tranquillity as it was ever in those times the lot of Christians to obtain. The mother of one emperor had been Origen’s disciple, and the emperor actually reigning was a Christian, however unworthy of such a profession. Now in this work Origen speaks of the superiority of the Christian churches in each several place, as, for instance, at Athens, Corinth, Alexandria, to the heathen assemblies, and of the Christian rulers to the heathen. He puts it as a mark of divine power that God sending His Son, “a God come in human soul and body,”(275) should have established everywhere churches offering the contrast of their polity to the assemblies of the superstitious, the impure, and the unjust. He considers that Christians do a greater benefit to their country than all other men by teaching them piety to the one God, and “gathering up into a certain divine and heavenly city those who have lived well in the smallest cities.”(276) “We,” he says, “knowing that there is in each city another fabric of a country, founded by the word of God, call those who are powerful in word and of a virtuous life to the government of churches: we do not accept the covetous to such a place, but force it against their will upon those who in their moderation would decline taking on them this general care of the Church of God.”(277) And the compulsion thus exercised is that “of the great King, whom we are persuaded to be the Son of God, God the Word.” But this other form of country which he saw in each city is “the whole Church of God, which the divine scriptures assert to be the Body of Christ, animated by the Son of God, while the limbs of this Body are particular believers; for as the soul quickens and moves the body, whose nature it is not to have the movement of life from itself, so the Word moving to what is fitting, and energising in the whole Body, the Church, moves likewise each member of it, who does nothing without the Word.”(278) And he completes this view in another beautiful passage wherein he describes Christ as the high-priest Aaron, who has received upon his single body the whole chrism, from whom it flows down upon his beard, the symbol of the complete man, and on to the utmost skirt of his raiment.