capital city. But although a prisoner awaiting a public trial, the imperial government gave him free liberty to receive in his own hired house members of the Christian Church, and indeed any who chose to come and listen to his teaching; and this liberty of free access to him was continued all through the two years of his waiting for the public trial. The words of the "Acts of the Apostles," a writing universally received as authentic, are singularly definite here: "And Paul dwelt two whole years in his own hired house (in Rome), and received all that came unto him, preaching the kingdom of God, and teaching those things which concern the Lord Jesus Christ, with all confidence, no man forbidding him" (Acts xxviii. 30-31).
It was during these two years of the imprisonment that the great teacher justified his subsequent title, accorded him by so many of the early Christian writers, of joint founder with S. Peter of the Roman Church. The foundations of the Church of the metropolis we believe certainly to have been laid by another leading member of the apostolic band, S. Peter.[1] But S. Paul's share in strengthening and in building up this Church, the most important congregation in the first days of Christianity, was without doubt very great.
At a very early period, certainly after the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple, Rome became the acknowledged centre and the metropolis of Christendom. The great world-capital was the meeting-place of the followers of the Name from all lands. Thither, too, naturally flocked the teachers of the principal heresies in doctrinal truth which very soon sprang up among Christian converts. Under these conditions something more, in such a centre as Rome, was imperatively needed than the simple direct Gospel teaching, however fervid: something additional to the recital of the wondrous Gospel story as told by S. Peter and repeated possibly verbatim by his disciple S. Mark. A deeper and fuller instruction was surely required in such a centre as Rome quickly became. Men would ask, Who and what was the Divine Founder of the religion,—what was His relation to the Father, what to the angel-world? What was known of His pre-
- ↑ See above, pp. 7-12, where the question of the foundation of the Church in Rome is fully discussed.
