in the East in the Greek language. Irenæus their bishop published his famous work Against all the Heresies in Greek. It seems probable that Christianity first made its way in Western Europe among the Jewish, Greek, and Syrian residents—colonists, merchants, and slaves. We know that at Rome it first appeared in the Ghetto among Hellenistic Jews. The Churches of Lyonne and Vienna seem to have sprung up in an offshoot from the Greek colony at Marseilles. Their famous bishop Irenæus had come to them from Asia Minor, and they took care to keep themselves in touch with the Greeks of that Eastern region.
Now the importance of these facts can scarcely be overestimated, although it has been overshadowed by another series of facts. Church historians have often called attention to the deep significance of the establishment of the Roman Empire just before the appearance of Christianity in the world. The Pax Romana which encircled the whole Mediterranean gave the first missionaries freedom to travel and admitted of an attentive hearing wherever they went. Everywhere they appeared as subjects of one vast empire preaching to fellow-subjects of the same empire. They were protected from uprisings of fanatical mobs by the strong, just Roman magistracy; and they could travel with ease and safety along the well-made and well-guarded Roman roads. Choosing the great towns for their chief centres of work, they found provincialism disappearing before enlarged cosmopolitan ideas, and so an atmosphere in which a gospel that overstepped the bounds of national jealousies might most readily receive sympathetic attention. Moreover, from the second century onwards, we see the growth of Roman law into a strong body of jurisprudence which is destined to combine with Christian doctrine in forming the two fundamental factors of mediæval and modern civilisation. Gradually the genius of Rome in government passed over from the empire to the Church, and popes came in for the inheritance of the power that had dropped
