n for the task; he added the zeal of the
theologian to the ready obedience of the soldier. He had written against
the Christians a work named _Philalethes_ (the lover of truth), which we
now know only in the answer by Eusebius of Caesarea. In this he denounced
the apostles as impostors, and the Christian miracles as trifling; and,
comparing them with the pretended miracles of Apollonius of Tyana,
he pronounced the latter more numerous, more important, and better
authenticated than the former by the evangelists; and he ridiculed
the Christians for calling Jesus a god, while the pagans did not raise
Apollonius higher than a man beloved by the gods.

This persecution under Diocletian was one of the most severe that the
Christians ever underwent from the Romans. It did not, however, wholly
stop the religious services, nor break up the regular government of the
Church. In the catechetical school, Pierius, whom we have before spoken
of as a man of learning, was succeeded by Theognostus and then by
Serapion, whose name reminds us that the Egyptian party was gaining
weight in the Alexandrian church. It can hardly have been for his
superior learning, it may have been because his opinions were becoming
more popular than those of the Greeks, that a professor with an Egyptian
name was placed at the head of the catechetical school. Serapion was
succeeded by Peter, who afterwards gained the bishopric of Alexandria
and a martyr's crown. But these men were little known beyond their
lecture-room. In the twentieth year of the reign, on the death of Peter,
the Bishop of Alexandria, who lost his life as a martyr, the presbyters
of the church met to choose a successor. Among their number was Arius,
whose name afterwards became so famous in ecclesiastical history, and
who had already, even before he was ordained a priest, offended many by
the bold manner in which he stated his religious opinions. But upon him,
if we may believe a partial historian, the majority of votes fell in
the choice of a patriarch of Alexandria, and had he not himself modestly
given way to the more ambitious Alexander, he might perhaps have been
saved from the treatment which he afterwards suffered from his rival.

When, in the year 305, Diocletian and his colleague, Valerius Maximian,
resigned the purple, Egypt with the rest of the East was given to
Galerius, who had also as Caesar been named Maximian on his Egyptian
coins, while Constantius Chlorus ruled the West. Ga