wrote treatises on philosophical theology, which indeed,
judged by a Western standard, could not be accounted orthodox, and
directed a theological school which maintained its ground in the third
century and attained great importance.[660] In Palestine, during the
time of Heliogabalus and Alexander (Severus), Julius Africanus composed
a series of books on scientific theology, which were specifically
different from the writings of Irenaeus and Tertullian; but which on the
other hand show the closest relationship in point of form to the
treatises of the so-called Gnostics. His inquiries into the relationship
of the genealogies of Jesus and into certain parts of the Greek
Apocalypse of Daniel showed that the Church's attention had been drawn
to problems of historical criticism. In his chronography the apologetic
interest is subordinate to the historical, and in his [Greek: Kestoi],
dedicated to Alexander Severus (Hippolytus had already dedicated a
treatise on the resurrection to the wife of Heliogabalus), we see fewer
traces of the Christian than of the Greek scholar. Alexander of AElia and
Theoktistus of Caesarea, the occupants of the two most important sees in
Palestine, were, contemporaneously with him, zealous patrons of an
independent science of theology. Even at that early time the former
founded an important theological library; and the fragments of his
letters preserved to us prove that he had caught not only the language,
but also the scientific spirit of the age. In Rome, at the beginning of
the third century, there was a scientific school where textual criticism
of the Bible was pursued and where the works of Aristotle, Theophrastus,
Euclid, and Galen were zealously read and utilised. Finally, the works
of Tertullian show us that, even among the Christians of Carthage, there
was no lack of such as wished to naturalise the pursuit of science
within the Church; and Eusebius (H. E. V. 27) has transmitted to us the
titles of a series of scientific works dating as far back as the year
200 and ascribed to ecclesiastics of that period.

Whilst all these phenomena, which collectively belong to the close of
the second and beginning of the third century, show that it was indeed
possible to suppress heresy in the Church, but not the impulse from
which it sprang, the most striking proof of this conclusion is the
existence of the so-called school of catechists in Alexandria. We cannot
now trace the origin of this school, which