earned to profit by the example of their rivals.
From the recent policy of the Jews they might understand the advantage
to a scattered community, without a local centre or a political status,
of erecting in a volume of sacred records their acknowledged standard of
faith and practice.

The scriptures of the New Testament, like the _Nuschua_ of the Jewish
rabbis, took the place of the holy of holies as the tabernacle of their
God and the pledge of their union with him.

The canon of their sacred books, however casual its apparent formation,
was indeed a providential development. The habitual references of
bishops and doctors to the words of their Founder, and the writings of
the first disciples, guided them to the proper sources of their faith
and taught them justly to discriminate the genuine from the spurious.

Meagre as are the remains of Christian literature of the second century,
they tend to confirm our assurance that the scriptures of the new
dispensation were known and recognized as divine at that early period,
and that the Church of Christ, the future mistress of the world, was
already become a great social fact, an empire within the empire.

MARTYRDOM OF POLYCARP AND JUSTIN MARTYR

POLYCARP'S EPISTLE TO THE PHILIPPIANS

A.D. 155

H. COX POLYCARP

The Roman emperor Antoninus Pius, who died A.D. 161, had been
tolerant to the new Judaic sect known as Christians. Under his mild
_regime_, although he did not encourage them, the faithful had
greatly multiplied. The Christians had become a body great enough
to be reckoned with in a political sense. The populace were
generally hostile to them as "enemies of the gods." More than one
of the apostolic fathers had suffered martyrdom, among them
Ignatius, a disciple of St. John and bishop of Antioch, who is said
to have been thrown to the lions in the Circus about A.D. 107. But
the account of the martyrdom of Polycarp is probably the first
authentic description we have.

Polycarp was born about A.D. 60, probably of Christian parents. He
bridges the little-known period between the age of his master, the
apostle John, and that of his own disciple, Irenaeus. During the
earlier half of the second century he was bishop of Smyrna. Ephesus
had become the new hope of the faith, and in that city Polycarp had
received his education and "lived in familiar intercourse with many