It is during the great forty days that our Lord founded the Primacy, when He made S. John and the rest of the Apostles sheep of Peter’s fold. The period of thirty-eight years which follows is the carrying into effect His design in the first stage. The Church grows around Peter. First in Jerusalem he forms a mass of disciples; then for a certain number of years at Antioch. In the second year of Claudius, the thirteenth after the Ascension, he lays the foundations of the Roman Church. In the sixtieth year of our era he sends forth S. Mark to found the Christian society in Alexandria. Thus he takes possession of the three great cities of the empire, of east, west, and south. In the mean time the labours of S. Paul and the other Apostles, in conjunction with those of Peter and in subordination to them, plant the Christian root in a great number of cities. As S. Paul toils all round the northern circuit of the empire, through Asia Minor, Macedonia, Illyricum, to Spain, his work has a manifest reference to the work of Peter in the metropolis of the east, of the south, and of the west. In the latter he joins his elder brother, and the two Princes of the Apostles offer up their lives together on the same day in that city which was to be the perpetual citadel of the Christian Faith, the immovable Rock of a divine Capitol. Thus was it Peter, “from whom the very Episcopate, and all the authority of this title sprung,”(292) and what Pope Boniface wrote in 422 is a simple fact of history: that “the formation of the universal Church at its birth took its beginning from the honour of blessed Peter, in whose person its regimen and sum consists. For from his fountain the stream of ecclesiastical discipline flowed forth into all churches, as the culture of religion progressively advanced.”(293) Thus the whole initial movement was from above downwards, and S. Cyprian was not only enunciating dogma but speaking history when he wrote that the Lord built the Church upon Peter. In one generation the structure rose above the ground, and during all that time S. Peter’s hand directed the work.