severance and efficacy to pagan
persecution. St. Pothinus the Martyr was succeeded as bishop at Lyons by
St. Irenaeus, the most learned, most judicious, and most illustrious of
the early heads of the Church in Gaul. Originally from Asia Minor,
probably from Smyrna, he had migrated to Gaul, at what particular date
is not known, and had settled as a simple priest in the diocese of
Lyons, where it was not long before he exercised vast influence, as well
on the spot as also during certain missions intrusted to him, and among
them one, they say, to the pope, St. Eleutherius, at Rome.

While bishop of Lyons, from A.D. 177 to 202, he employed the
five-and-twenty years in propagating the Christian faith in Gaul, and in
defending, by his writings, the Christian doctrines against the discord
to which they had already been subjected in the East, and which was
beginning to penetrate the West.

In 202, during the persecution instituted by Septimius Severus, St.
Irenaeus crowned by martyrdom his active and influential life. It was in
his episcopate that there began what may be called the swarm of
Christian missionaries who, toward the end of the second and during the
third century, spread over the whole of Gaul, preaching the faith and
forming churches. Some went from Lyons at the instigation of St.
Irenaeus; others from Rome, especially under the pontificate of Pope St.
Fabian, himself martyred in 249; St. Felix and St. Fortunatus to
Valence, St. Ferreol to Besancon, St. Marcellus to Chalons-sur-Saone,
St. Benignus to Dijon, St. Trophimus to Arles, St. Paul to Narbonne, St.
Saturninus to Toulouse, St. Martial to Limoges, St. Andeol and St.
Privatus to the Cevennes, St. Austremoine to Clermont-Ferrand, St.
Galian to Tours, St. Denis to Paris, and so many others that their names
are scarcely known beyond the pages of erudite historians, or the very
spots where they preached, struggled, and conquered, often at the price
of their lives.

Such were the founders of the faith and of the Christian Church in
France. At the commencement of the fourth century their work was, if not
accomplished, at any rate triumphant; and when, A.D. 312, Constantine
declared himself a Christian, he confirmed the fact of the conquest of
the Roman world, and of Gaul in particular, by Christianity. No doubt
the majority of the inhabitants were not as yet Christians; but it was
clear that the Christians were in the ascendant and had command of the
future.

O