_Central Authority in the Christian Church:_ The Apostles, while they lived, exercised a general jurisdiction over the Church, to which all submitted without question. In the exercise of their general authority they organized branches of the Church, appointed Elders or Bishops to take the oversight of them, and instructed them in Church government, and discipline, and doctrine. After the demise of the Apostles, there seems to have been left no central authority to exercise the functions of general supervision or presidency over the entire Church, such as the Twelve had exercised. That center of unity, together with the power thereof, seems to have vanished from the Church with the Apostles. The Bishops and some subordinate officers remained, it is true, but these were local, not general authorities. The Church in each city or district of country after the Apostolic age seems to have been regarded as a sort of independent republic of itself, without any bond of consociation with any other church beyond that which was the result of possessing a common faith in Christianity, which bond was one of sympathy merely, not of hierachical association. _Rise of the Roman Hierarchy:_ The rise of the hierarchy, with the centralization of its powers in the Bishop of Rome, and which ultimately dominated the whole Church, and not only the Church but, directly and indirectly, the western civilized world, came later, and was of gradual development; and when it was finally established, it was not the organization described in the New Testament, the Church with an inspired Priesthood of Apostles, and Prophets, Evangelists, Seventies and Pastors, etc., but a hierarchy fashioned by man out of such remnants of Church organization as survived Apostolic times. As the number of Christians increased, the bishops of large cities organized new branches of the Church in the suburbs of their cities, and in the towns and villages adjacent, and ordained for them a ministry. It was but natural perhaps that the officers of these new branches of the Church, both the bishops and subordinate clergy, should look to the one who had brought them into existence as a source of general presiding authority over them. And hence in time arose what were called metropolitan bishops, bishops who had under their direction the bishops of neighboring towns and villages--bishops of the "suburbs and the fields," they were sometimes called--and perhaps of the entire province of which the metropolitan city was recognized as the center. As the bishop of the metropolis, or of a province, became the center of ecclesiastical unity for that province, so too in time, the bishops of cities which were the capitals of the three great divisions of the empire--Antioch, Alexandria and Rome--asserted a superior dignity over metropolitan bishops. It was in these cities that the exarchs of the empire resided, and if we may trust the authority of Neander.