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PART I

THE CHURCH AND THE EMPIRE

 

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DIVISION I

THE AGE OF THE FATHERS

CHAPTER I

CHRISTIANITY IN THE EAST UNDER THE PAGAN EMPERORS

 

(a) Eusebius, Hist. Eccl.; Ante-Nicene Fathers; Pliny, Letters; Tillemont, Memoirs, etc.

(b) Ulhorn, Conflict of Christianity with Heathenism, 1879; Mommsen, Provinces of the Roman Empire, Eng. Trans., 1886; Ramsay, Christianity in the Roman Empire, 1893; Harnack, Expansion of Christianity, Eng. Trans., 1904.

 

When we begin to inquire into the extension of Christianity, we are confronted by the questions: What geographical area was brought under evangelising influences?—By what time was each region reached?—To what extent was it actually Christianised? This last question is by far the most important of the three, and it is the most difficult to answer. We can obtain a fairly safe rough idea of the area over which some knowledge of the gospel had been carried and in which some Churches had been planted during the first three centuries of the Christian era. Italy, Spain, and Gaul in the West, Britain in the North, the Roman province of Africa in the South, had all received Christianity to some extent; but though

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