becomes fainter and scantier. This circumstance is no doubt due
occasion Polycrates speaks of the crowds of bishops whom he had summoned to confer with him on the Paschal question. 5. As we turn from Asia Minor to MACEDONIA and GREECE, evidence becomes fainter and scantier. This circumstance is no doubt due partly to the fact that these churches were much less active and important during the second century than the Christian communities of Asia Minor, but the phenomena cannot perhaps be wholly explained by this consideration. When Tertullian in one of his rhetorical flights challenges the heretical teachers to consult the apostolic churches, where 'the very sees of the Apostles still preside,' adding, 'If Achaia is nearest to you, then you have Corinth; if you are not far from Macedonia, you have Philippi, you have the Thessalonians; if you can reach Asia, you have Ephesus:' his main argument was doubtless just, and even the language would commend itself to its own age, for episcopacy was the only form of government known or remembered in the church when he wrote: but a careful investigation scarcely allows, and certainly does not encourage us, to place Corinth and Philippi and Thessalonica in the same category with Ephesus as regards episcopacy. The term apostolic see was appropriate to the latter; but so far as we know, it cannot be strictly applied to the former. During the early years of the second century, when episcopacy was firmly established in the principal churches of Asia Minor, Polycarp sends a letter to the Philippians. He writes in the name of himself and his presbyters; he gives advice to the Philippians respecting the obligations and the authority of presbyters and deacons; he is minute in his instructions respecting one individual presbyter, Valens by name, who had been guilty of some crime; but throughout the letter he never once refers to their bishop; and indeed its whole tone is hardly consistent with the supposition that they had any chief officer holding the same prominent position at Philippi which he himself held at Smyrna. We are thus led to the inference that episcopacy did not exist at all among the Philippians at this time, or existed only in an elementary form, so that the bishop was a mere president of the presbyteral council. At Thessalonica indeed, according to a tradition mentioned by Origen, the same Caius whom St Paul describes as his host at Corinth was afterwards appointed
bishop; but with so common a name the possibilities of error are great, even if the testimony were earlier in date and expressed in more distinct terms. When from Macedonia we pass to Achaia, the same phenomena present themselves. At the close of the first century Clement writes to Corinth, as at the beginning of the second century Polycarp writes to Philippi. As in the latter epistle, so in the former, there is no allusion to the episcopal office: yet the main subject of Clement's letter is the expulsion and ill treatment of certain presbyters, whose authority he maintains as holding an office instituted by and handed down from the Apostles themselves. If Corinth however was with out a bishop in the strict sense at the close of the first century, she cannot long have remained so. When some fifty years later Hegesippus stayed here on his way to Rome, Primus was bishop of this Church; and it is clear moreover from this writer's language that Primus had been preceded by several occupants of the see. Indeed the order of his narrative, so far as we can piece it together from the broken fragments preserved in. Eusebius, might suggest the inference, not at all improbable in itself, that episcopacy had been established at Corinth as a corrective of the dissensions and feuds which had called forth Clement's letter . Again Dionysius, one of the immediate successors of Primus, was the writer of several letters of which fragments are extant; and at the close of the century we meet with a later bishop of Corinth, Bacchyllus, who Athens. takes an active part in the Paschal controversy. When from Corinth we pass on to Athens, a very early instance of a bishop confronts us, on authority which seems at first sight good. Eusebius represents Dionysius of Corinth, who wrote apparently about the year 170, as stating that his namesake the Areopagite, 'having been brought to the faith by the Apostle Paul according to the account in the Acts, was the first to be entrusted with the bishopric (or supervision) of the diocese (in the language of those times, the parish) of the Athenians.' Now, if we could be sure that Eusebius was here reporting the exact words of Dionysius, the testimony though not conclusive would be entitled to great deference. In this case the easiest solution would be, that this ancient writer had not unnaturally confounded the earlier and later usage of the word bishop. But it seems not improbable that Eusebius