vings are not offered to the Father and Creator of the universe
by the name of the crucified Jesus." (Dial cum Tryph.) Tertullian, who
comes about fifty years after Justin, appeals to the governors of the
Roman empire in these terms: "We were but of yesterday, and we have
filled your cities, islands, towns, and boroughs, the camp, the senate,
and the forum. They (the heathen adversaries of Christianity) lament
that every sex, age, and condition, and persons of every rank also, are
converts to that name." (Tertull. Apol. c. 37.) I do allow that these
expressions are loose, and may be called declamatory. But even
declamation hath its bounds; this public boasting upon a subject which
must be known to every reader was not only useless but unnatural, unless
the truth of the case, in a considerable degree, corresponded with the
description; at least, unless it had been both true and notorious, that
great multitudes of Christians, of all ranks and orders, were to be
found in most parts of the Roman empire. The same Tertullian, in another
passage, by way of setting forth the extensive diffusion of
Christianity, enumerates as belonging to Christ, beside many other
countries, the "Moors and Gaetulians of Africa, the borders of Spain,
several nations of France, and parts of Britain inaccessible to the
Romans, the Sarmatians, Daci, Germans, and Scythians;" (Ad Jud. c. 7.)
and, which is more material than the extent of the institution, the
number of Christians in the several countries in which it prevailed is
thus expressed by him: "Although so great a multitude, that in almost
every city we form the greater part, we pass our time modestly and in
silence." (Ad Scap. c. iii.) A Clemens Alexandrinus, who preceded
Tertullian by a few years, introduced a comparison between the success
of Christianity and that of the most celebrated philosophical
institutions: "The philosophers were confined to Greece, and to their
particular retainers; but the doctrine of the Master of Christianity not
remain in Judea, as philosophy did in Greece, but is throughout the
whole world, in every nation, and village, and city, both of Greeks and
barbarians, converting both whole houses and separate individuals,
having already brought over to the truth not a few of the philosophers
themselves. If the Greek philosophy he prohibited, it immediately
vanishes; whereas, from the first preaching of our doctrine, kings and
tyrants, governors and presidents, with their