tter of the good centurion was, perhaps,
like that of the Ethiopian eunuch, accepted as an exceptional case,
justified by a revelation and an express order from God. Still the
matter was far from being settled. This was the first controversy which
had taken place in the bosom of the Church; the paradise of interior
peace had lasted for six or seven years.

About the year 40 the great question upon which depended all the future
of Christianity appears thus to have been propounded. Peter and Philip
took a very just view of what was the true solution, and baptized
pagans.

The new faith was spread from place to place with marvellous rapidity.
The members of the Church of Jerusalem, who had been dispersed
immediately after the death of Stephen, pushing their conquests along
the coast of Phoenicia, reached Cyprus and Antioch. They were at first
guided by the sole principle of preaching the Gospel to the Jews only.

Antioch, "the metropolis of the East," the third city of the world, was
the centre of this Christian movement in Northern Syria. It was a city
with a population of more than five hundred thousand souls, and the
residence of the imperial legate of Syria. Suddenly advanced to a high
degree of splendor by the Seleucidae, it reaped great benefit from the
Roman occupation. Antioch, from its foundation, had been wholly a
Grecian city. The Macedonians of Antigone and Seleucus had brought with
them into that country of the Lower Orontes their most lively
recollections, their worship, and the names of their country. The
Grecian mythology was there adopted as it were in a second home; they
pretended to show in the country a crowd of "holy places" forming part
of this mythology. The city was full of the worship of Apollo and of the
nymphs. The degradation of the people was awful. The peculiarity of
these centres of moral putrefaction is to reduce all the race of mankind
to the same level. The depravity of certain Levantine cities, which are
dominated by the spirit of intrigue and delivered up entirely to low
cunning, can scarcely give us an idea of the degree of corruption
reached by the human race at Antioch. It was an inconceivable medley of
mountebanks, quacks, buffoons, magicians, miracle-mongers, sorcerers,
false priests; a city of races, games, dances, processions, _fetes_,
revels, of unbridled luxury, of all the follies of the East, of the most
unhealthy superstitions, and of the fanaticism of the orgy. The city
wa