descended from the Churches of Asia Minor. If so, the episcopal form
purpose of ascertaining and recording the doctrines of the Roman Church, is welcomed by the bishop. About the same time also another more illustrious visitor, Polycarp the venerable bishop of Smyrna, arrives in Rome to confer with the head of the Roman Church on the Paschal dispute and there falls in with and denounces the heretic Marcion. These facts are stated on contemporary authority. Of SOTER also, the next in succession, a contemporary record is preserved. Dionysius of Corinth, writing to the Romans, praises the zeal of their bishop, who in his fatherly care for the suffering poor and for the prisoners working in the mines had maintained and extended the hereditary fame of his church for zeal in all charitable and good works. In ELEUTHERUS, who succeeds Soter, we have the earliest recorded instance of an archdeacon. When Hegesippus paid his visit to the metropolis, he found Eleutherus standing in this relation to the bishop Anicetus, and seems to have made his acquaintance while acting in this capacity. Eleutherus however was a contemporary, not only of Hegesippus, but also of the great writers Irenaeus and Tertullian, who speak of the episcopal succession in the churches generally, and in Rome especially, as the best safeguard for the transmission of the true faith from apostolic times. With VICTOR, the successor of Eleutherus, a new era begins. Apparently the first Latin prelate who held the metropolitan see of Latin Christendom, he was moreover the first Roman bishop who is known to have had intimate relations with the imperial court, and the first also who advanced those claims to universal dominion which his successors in later ages have always consistently and often successfully maintained. 'I hear,' writes Tertullian scornfully, 'that an edict has gone forth, aye and that a peremptory edict; the chief pontiff, forsooth, I mean the bishop of bishops, has issued his commands.' At the end of the first century the Roman Church was swayed by the mild and peaceful counsels of the presbyter-bishop Clement; the close of the second witnessed the autocratic pretensions of the haughty pope Victor, the prototype of a Hildebrand or an Innocent. 9. The Churches of GAUL were closely connected with and probably descended from the Churches of Asia Minor. If so, the episcopal form of government would probably be coeval with the foundation of