POPE, Alexander (1688-1744), was the most famous English poet of his century. His own century dwelt most upon his merits; the 19th century is disposed rather to dwell upon his defects, both as a poet and as a man, with a persistency and minuteness that more than counterbalance any exaggeration in the estimate formed when it was the fashion to admire his verse and treat his moral obliquity as a foible. Substantially, the best judgment of the two centuries is at one, only different sides are prominent in the bulk of current criticism. All are agreed that he was not a poet of the first rank, and nobody can deny that he did certain things in literature in a way that has been the despair of all who have since attempted the same kind of thing. The great point of difference lies in the importance to be assigned to such work as Pope’s satires. The polemic against his title to the name of poet would be contemptible were it not that beneath the dispute about the name there is a desire to impress on the public a respect for the highest kinds of poetry. The 19th century takes the poet’s mission more seriously than the 18th. Similarly with Pope’s moral delinquencies. With the exception of some details recently brought to light with an industry worthy of a better subject, his contemporaries were as well aware of these delinquencies as we are now, only none but his bitter enemies were so earnest in denouncing them. “In this design,” Johnson says in his comments on the Dunciad, “there was petulance and malignity enough, but I cannot think it very criminal.” And this was the general verdict of his contemporaries about the poet’s moral weakness. They knew that he was insincere, intriguing, touchy, and spiteful, but, as nobody was much harmed by his conduct, they could not think it very criminal. Perhaps his physical weakness made them more indulgent to his elfish and sprite-like temper. But, apart from this, intriguing was the way of his world, a fact too much kept out of sight when Pope is denounced for his crooked ways in little matters, as if he had lived in our own straightforward and virtuous age.

If we are to judge Pope, whether as a man or as a poet, with human fairness, and not merely by comparison with standards of abstract perfection, there are two features of his times that must be kept steadily in view—the character of political strife in those days, and the political relations of men of letters. As long as the succession to the crown was doubtful, and political failure might mean loss of property, banishment, or death, politicians, playing for higher stakes, played more fiercely and unscrupulously than in modern days, and there was no controlling force of public opinion to keep them within the bounds of common honesty. Hence the age of Queen Anne is pre-eminently an age of intrigue. The government was almost as unsettled as in the early days of personal monarchy, and there was this différence that it was policy rather than force upon which men depended for keeping their position. Secondly, men of letters were admitted to the inner circles of intrigue as they had never been before and as they have never been since. A generation later Walpole defied them, and paid the rougher instruments that he considered sufficient for his purpose in solid coin of the realm; but Queen Anne’s statesmen, whether from difference of tastes or difference of policy, paid their principal literary champions with social privileges and honourable public appointments. Hence men of letters were directly infected by the low political morality of the unsettled time. And the character of their poetry also suffered. The most prominent defects of our Augustan age in 19th-century eyes—the lack of high and sustained imagination, the genteel liking for “nature to advantage dressed,” the incessant striving after wit—were fostered if not generated by the social atmosphere. The works of the serious imagination could not thrive in a fashionable society, feverishly interested in the daily chances of intrigue for place and power.

Pope was peculiarly fitted by nature to take the impress of his surroundings—plastic, sensitive, eagerly covetous of approbation. Affection and admiration were as necessary to his life as the air he breathed. “Pope was from his birth,” Johnson says, “of a constitution tender and delicate, but is said to have shown remarkable gentleness and sweetness of disposition. The weakness of his body continued through his life; but the mildness of his mind perhaps ended with his childhood.” Perhaps; but certainly to a much less degree with the friends who loved and honoured him. With them he was always more or less sweet and docile; his petulance and malignity were directed as by an instinct of self-preservation against those who baulked him in his craving for admiration, a spiritual food literally and physically essential to the sustenance of his fragile being.

If Pope had been a man of more robust and self-sufficing constitution, he had one great advantage for resisting the spirit of his age. He was cut off by the religion of his parents from all public employment. His father was a Roman Catholic, a merchant in Lombard Street, London, who retired from business with a small fortune in the year of the Revolution, and fixed his residence at Binfield in Windsor Forest. Pope was born at Lombard Street on

May 22, 1688, but his father’s retirement to Binfield took place soon after his birth. The delicate child’s book education was desultory and irregular. His father’s religion excluded him from the public schools, if there was no other impediment to his being sent there. Before he was twelve he got a smattering of Latin and Greek from various masters, from a priest in Hampshire, from a schoolmaster at Twyford near Winchester, from another in Marylebone, from a third at Hyde Park Corner, and finally from another priest at home. “He thought himself the better,” Spence says, “in some respects for not having had a regular education. He (as he observed in particular) read originally for the sense, whereas we are taught for so many years to read only for words.” This helps to explain his attack on Bentley in the Dunciad. He afterwards learnt French and Italian, probably to a similar extent. As far as the sense was concerned, he could get a dilution of that at least in translations, for all poets of note—Greek, Latin, French, and Italian—had been translated into English verse in the course of the previous century. Of these translations the precocious boy availed himself voraciously, and by the age of twelve, when he was finally settled at home and left to himself, he was not only a confirmed reader, but an eager aspirant to the highest honours in poetry. When at school in London he had crept into Will’s coffee-house to look at Dryden; he had lampooned his schoolmaster, and made a play out of Ogilby’s Iliad for his schoolfellows; and, thinking himself the greatest genius that - ever was, he retired to the solitude of the forest to write a great epic on a mythological subject, his hero being Alcander, a prince of Rhodes.

Nothing of Pope’s was printed till 1709, when he was twenty-one. The detachment from contemporary life in London which his father’s religion and retirement might have occasioned was prevented by one of the accidents of that position. Fortunately or unfortunately for him, there were among the Papist families near Binfield men capable of giving a direction to his eager ambition, men of literary tastes, and connexions with the literary world. These families held together as persecuted sects always do, and the family priests were mediums of communication.

Through some such medium the retired merchant’s precocious son was brought under the notice of Sir William Trumbull, a retired diplomatist living at Easthampstead, within a few miles of Binfield. At Whiteknights, near Reading, lived another Roman Catholic, Mr Englefield, “a great lover of poets and poetry.” Through him Pope made the acquaintance of Wycherley and Harry Cromwell, and Wycherley introduced him to Walsh, then of great renown as a critic. Thus the aspiring poet, before he was seventeen, was admitted to the society of London “wits” and men of fashion, and he was cordially encouraged as a prodigy. It may be doubted whether the company of these veteran relics of Restoration manners was much for the benefit of the moral tone of the bookish youth, who learnt from them to speak and write of the fair sex with a very knowing air of rakish gaiety. But he discussed poetry also with them, as was then the fashion, and soon under their influence his own vague aspirations received shape and direction.

Walsh’s contribution to his development was the advice to study “correctness,” as the one merit that was still possible for an English poet. But before he was introduced to Walsh, which was in 1705, he had already written the first draft of his “Pastorals,” a subject on which Walsh was an authority, having written the preface to Dryden’s translation of Virgil’s Eclogues. Trumbull’s influence was earlier and more extensive. For him may fairly be claimed the credit of having been Pope’s schoolmaster in poetry. It was he who turned Pope’s attention to the French critics, out of the study of whom grew the Essay on Criticism ; he suggested the subject of Windsor Forest, and he started the idea of translating Homer. When Trumbull first saw the precocious boy, he was hard at work on his great epic. He had probably chosen his subject on the first impulses of his crude ambition, because it was an established maxim at the time that a great epic is the greatest work of which the human mind is capable. It says something for Pope’s docility at this stage that he recognized so soon that a long course of preparation was needed for such a magnum opus, and began steadily and patiently to discipline himself. The epic was put aside and afterwards burnt; versification was industriously practised in shorter “essays”; and an elaborate study was made of accepted critics and models. When we look at the subjects of Pope’s juvenile attempts, we cannot fail to be struck by a singular clearness of purpose in his poetic ambition, such as might have come from the judgment of the accomplished man of the world who was his adviser. He not only chose kinds of poetry in which there was an interest at the time, and a consequent likelihood of gaining attention and winning applause, but he had an eye to subjects that had not already been appropriated by great English poets, and in which success was still open to all comers. At the beginning of the 18th century Dryden’s success had given great vogue to translations and modernizations. The air was full of theories as to the best way of doing such things. What Dryden had touched Pope did not presume to meddle with,— Dryden was his hero and master; but there was much more of the same kind to be done. Dryden had rewritten three of the Canterbury tales; Pope tried his hand at the Merchant’s Tale, and the Prologue to the Wife of Bath’s Tale, and produced also an imitation of the House oj Fame. Dryden had translated Virgil; Pope experimented on the Thebais of Statius, Ovid’s Heroides and Metamorphoses, and the Odyssey. He knew little Latin and less Greek, but there were older versions in English whose metre he could improve upon and from which he could get a clue to the sense; and, when the correspondents to whom he submitted his versions pointed out mistranslations, he could answer that he had always agreed with them, but that he had deferred to the older translators against his own judgment. It was one of Pope’s little vanities—very venial in a nature requiring such support —to try to give the impression that his metrical skill was more precocious even than it was, and we cannot accept his published versions of Statius and Chaucer (published in “miscellanies” at intervals between 1709 and 1714) as indisputable evidence of his proficiency at the age of fifteen or sixteen, the date, according to his own assertion, of their composition. But it is indisputable that at the age of sixteen his skill in verse was such as to astonish a veteran critic like Walsh, and that his verses were handed about in manuscript and admired by men then in the foremost rank in literature. There is no better proof of his dexterity than his imitations, or rather parodies, of Chaucer, Spencer, Rochester, and Dorset, though dexterity is their only merit. His metrical letter to Cromwell, which Mr Elwin dates in 1707, when Pope was nineteen, is also a brilliant feat of versification, and has turns of wit in it as easy and spirited as any to be found in his mature satires. Pope was twenty-one when he sent the “Ode to Solitude” to Cromwell, and said it was written before he was twelve years old. He may have retouched this; in all probability he did; perhaps every line of it was written when he was twenty-one; but there is abundance of external evidence of his extraordinary precocity as a metrician. He was vain enough to try to make it appear still more extraordinary than it was; but the attempt was hardly more puerile and comically superfluous than the solemn efforts of criticism to reduce his pretensions. They are too solidly founded to be shaken either by his own vain superstructure or by the outraged critic’s vindictive undermining.

Precocious Pope was, but he was also industrious; and he spent some eight or nine years in arduous and enthusiastic discipline, reading, studying, experimenting, taking the advice of some and laughing in his sleeve at the advice of others, “poetry his only business,” he said, “and idleness his only pleasure,” before anything of his appeared in print. In these preliminary studies he seems to have guided himself by the maxim formulated (after a French model) in a letter to Walsh (written at the date he gives, or later) that “it seems not so much the perfection of sense to say things that have never been said before, as to express those best that have been said oftenest.” His first publication was his “Pastorals.” Tonson the bookseller had heard these pastorals highly spoken of, and he sent a polite note to Pope asking that he might have them for one of his miscellanies. They appeared accordingly in May 1709 at the end of a volume containing contributions from Philips, Sheffield, Garth, and Rowe, besides Pope’s version of Chaucer’s Merchant’s Tale. We have not space to show what can be said on both sides about these artificial compositions, avowedly designed to represent the manners of an imaginary golden age, when men of “wit and refinement” were shepherds. The worst that can be said of them was said by implication in the Guardian in 1713, when a case, which was afterwards justified by Allan Ramsay, was made out for the representation of real English country life. Johnson, though he did not approve of pastorals in the abstract, said a word of common sense against exaggerated depreciation of Pope’s attempt. Few persons are likely nowadays to put themselves in a position for making a fair historical estimate of Pope’s pastorals. There was a passing fashion for the kind of thing at the time, and possibly he wrote them under the impression that they offered a new field for poetic ambition in English, not knowing or forgetting what had been done by Giles Fletcher and Milton. Or he may have thought that a great poet should begin as Virgil began with pastorals. At any rate his pastorals, though Johnson was right in remarking the “closeness of thought” shown in their composition, cannot be ranked high as poetry, however much superior to everything else written in a passing fashion.

Pope’s next publication was the Essay on Criticism. “In every work regard the writer’s end,” is one of its sensible precepts, and one that is often neglected by critics of the essay, who comment upon it as if Pope’s end had been to produce an original and profound treatise on first principles. His aim was much less lofty—being simply to condense, methodize, and give as perfect and novel expression as he could to floating opinions about the poet’s aims and methods, and the critic’s duties, to “what oft was thought but ne’er so well expressed.” “The town” was interested in belles lettres, and given to conversing on the subject; Pope’s essay was simply a brilliant contribution to the fashionable conversation. The youthful author said with delicious loftiness that he did not expect the sale to be quick because “not one gentleman in sixty, even of liberal education, could understand it.” But he misjudged his audience. The town was fairly dazzled by it—such learning, such comprehensiveness of judgment, such felicity of expression, was indeed a marvel in one so young. Many of its admirers, doubtless, like Lady Mary Montague, would have thought less of it if they had not believed all the maxims to be original; but people of fashion are seldom wide readers, and they gave Pope credit for much that they might have found, where he found it, in Quintilian, Rapin, and Bossu. “The truth is," Mr Elwin says, “that Addison, by his encomiums and authority, brought into vogue the exaggerated estimate entertained of the essay.” Nothing could be more preposterously far from “the truth.”

A better illustration could not be found of the critical vice that Pope censures of “forming short ideas” by attending to parts to the neglect of the whole. If the whole of Addison’s paper is read, it stands out in its true colours as a kindly gentle attempt to throw cold water on the enthusiasm about a work which had been published for some months and was already, as the paper admits, “highly esteemed by the best judges.” It is “a masterpiece in its kind”; but people expect too much from the kind—originality, for instance. And again, it is “a masterpiece in its kind,” worthy of a place beside Roscommon’s Essay on Translated Verse and Mulgrave’s Essay on the Art of Poetry ! Most exaggerated encomiums these! How kindly, too, the paper opens by giving prominence to trivial incidents in the essay, one or two passing strokes of satire at Blackmore and Dennis. Bad poets are given to detraction; they try to raise themselves by pulling down the reputation of their brothers in the art. A, third of the whole paper is devoted to warning the young poet against a spirit of envy and detraction, all because he had thrown a stone in passing at two of the common butts of their generation. But this was Addison’s kindliness; he wished to give the promising youth a lesson against a bad habit. Read the whole paper (Spectator, No. 253) and judge.

The Rape of the Lock in its first form appeared in 1712 in Linton’s Miscellany ; the “machinery” of sylphs and gnomes was an afterthought, and the poem was republished as we now have it early in 1714. This was his first poem written on an inspiration from real life, from nature and not from books. A gentleman had in a frolic surreptitiously cut off a lock of a young lady’s hair, and the liberty had been resented; Pope heard the story from his friend Caryll, who suggested that it might be a subject for a mock-heroic poem like Boileau’s Lutrin. Pope caught at the hint; the mock-heroic treatment of the pretty frivolities of fashionable life just suited his freakish sprightliness of wit, and his studies of the grand epic at the time put him in excellent vein. The Rape of the Lock is almost universally admitted to be his masterpiece. English critics from his own time to the present have competed in lauding its airiness, its ingenuity, its exquisite finish. But Μ. Taine’s criticism shows how much depends upon the spirit in which such humorous trifles are approached. The poem strikes Μ. Taine as a piece of harsh, scornful, indelicate buffoonery, a mere succession of oddities and contrasts, of expressive figures unexpected and grinning, an example of English insensibility to French sweetness and refinement. Mr Leslie Stephen objects on somewhat different grounds to the poet’s tone towards women. What especially offends the French critic’s delicate sense is the bearishness of Pope’s laughter at an elegant and beautiful woman of fashion. Pope describes with a grin of amusement all the particulars of the elaborate toilet with which Belinda prepared her beauty for conquest, and all the artificial airs and graces with which she sought to bewitch the heart of susceptible man. The Frenchman listens without sympathy, without appreciation, with the contemptuous wonder of a well-bred man at clownish buffoonery. What is there to laugh at? Is she not preparing a beautiful picture? She cannot do this without powders and washes and paint-pots. What is there to laugh at in this? It is mere matter of fact The entire surrender of the female heart to little artifices for little ends does not apparently strike the Frenchman as ludicrous. Mr Stephen’s laughter is checked by the serious thought that this is a misrepresentation of women, that women are spoken of in the poem as if they were all like Belinda. But the Frenchman is not moved to laughter at all; it would seem as if his delight in the finished picture, the elegant graceful captivating woman, hallowed every ingredient used in the making of it. Such are the differences in national humour. With English readers the change of manners since the fashionable party rowed up the river to spend a happy day at Hampton is more likely to be an obstacle to the enjoyment of Pope’s airy extravagance.

In the interval between the first and the enlarged edition of the Rape of the Lock, Pope gave the finishing touches to his Windsor Forest, and published it in March 1713, with a flattering dedication to the secretary at war and an opportune allusion to the peace of Utrecht. This was a nearer approach to taking a political side than Pope had yet made. His principle had been to keep clear of politics, and not to attach himself to any of the sets into which literary men were divided by party. Although inclined to the Jacobite party by his religion, he was on friendly terms with the Whig coterie, so friendly indeed as to offend some of his co-religionists. He had contributed his poem “The Messiah” to the Spectator; he had written an article or two in the Guardian; and he wrote a prologue for Addison’s Cato. But Pope’s advances had not been received in a way to satisfy a man of his petulant and exacting temper. Mr Elwin is much mistaken in supposing that Addison helped to bring Pope into notice in the Spectator. We have seen how he treated the Essay on Criticism. When the Rape of the Lock was published, Addison is said to have praised it to Pope himself as merum sal, but he was much more guarded in the Spectator. There he dismissed one of the gems of English literature with two sentences of patronizing faint praise to the young poet whom he rejoiced to see getting· on, coupled it with Tickell’s “Ode on the Prospect of Peace,” and devoted the rest of the article to an elaborate puff of “the pastorals of Mr Philips.” We have only to look at the shameless puffery of the members of the little senate, not only in this article but throughout all the periodicals of the coterie, to see how little the young Mr Pope owed to Addison.

When Pope showed a leaning to the Tories in Windsor Forest, the coterie, so far from helping him, made insidious war on him—not open war but underhand war. Within a few weeks of the publication of the poem, and when it was the talk of the town, there began to appear in the Guardian a series of articles on “Pastorals.” Not a word was said about Windsor Forest, but everybody knew to what the general principles referred. Modern pastoral poets were ridiculed for introducing Greek moral deities, Greek flowers and fruits, Greek names of shepherds, Greek sports and customs and religious rites. They ought to make use of English rural mythology—hobthrushes, fairies, goblins, and witches; they should give English names to their shepherds; they should mention flowers indigenous to English climate and soil; and they should introduce English proverbial sayings, dress, and customs. All excellent principles, and all neglected by Pope in Windsor Forest. The poem was fairly open to criticism in these points; there -are many beautiful passages in it, showing close though somewhat professional observation of nature, but the mixture of heathen deities and conventional archaic fancies with modern realities is incongruous, and the comparison of Queen Anne to Diana was ludicrously

infelicitous. But the sting of the articles did not lie in the truth of the oblique criticisms. “The pastorals of Mr Philips,” published four years before, were again trotted out. Here was a true pastoral poet, the eldest born of Spenser, the worthy successor of Theocritus and Virgil! Pope’s pastorals have their defects, great defects, but it was an unkind cut to him to prefer such trash, and with such audacious emphasis. It was an affront, but so contrived that the sufferer could not retaliate without putting himself in the wrong, a mean backbiting provocation, the action of a critic “willing to wound and yet afraid to strike.”

Pope took an amusing revenge, which turned the laugh against his assailants. He sent Steele an anonymous paper in continuation of the articles in the Guardian on pastoral poetry, reviewing the poems of Mr Pope by the light of the principles laid down. Ostensibly Pope was censured for breaking the rules, and Philips praised for conforming to them, quotations being given from both. The quotations were sufficient to dispose of the pretensions of poor Philips, and Pope did not choose his own worst passages, accusing himself of actually deviating sometimes into poetry. Although the Guardian's principles were also brought into ridicule by burlesque exemplifications of them after the manner of Gay’s Shepherd's Week, Steele, misled by the opening sentences, was at first unwilling to print what appeared to be a direct attack on Pope, and asked Pope’s consent to the publication, which was graciously granted.

The relations between Pope and his Whig friends were further strained by one or two little incidents about the same time. The truculent Dennis attacked both Pope’s Rape of the Lock and Addison’s Cato. Pope said nothing in his own defence, but—we were very obliging in those days—defended his friend Addison in a Narrative of the Frenzy of John Dennis. The attack was so coarse that Addison sent Steele to Dennis to disclaim all connexion with it. Then Pope asked his friend Addison’s advice about the enlargement of the Rape of the Lock, and Addison advised him to leave it as it was, which advice the man who had asked it attributed to jealousy.

The estrangement was completed in connexion with Pope’s translation of Homer. This enterprise was definitively undertaken in 1713. The work was to be published by subscription as Dryden’s Virgil had been. Men of all parties subscribed, their unanimity being a striking proof of the position Pope had attained at the age of twenty-five. It was as if he had received a national commission as by general consent the first poet of his time. But the unanimity was broken by a discordant note. A member of the Addison clique, Tickell, attempted to run a rival version. There was nothing criminal in this, but it was an irritating continuation of the cold grudging treatment that Pope had all along received from the same quarter. Pope suspected Addison’s instigation; Tickell had at least Addison’s encouragement. Pope’s famous character of Addison, if not true in the main, is at least a strictly fair description, inspired not by malignity but by legitimate resentment, if resentment is ever legitimate, of Addison’s treatment of himself as he was rising into fame. Pope afterwards claimed to have been magnanimous, and he is suspected of having supported this claim by petty inventions in his account of the quarrel. Magnanimity he could not fairly claim; but he did not attack without provocation.

The translation of Homer was Pope’s chief employment for twelve years. The new pieces in the miscellanies published in 1717, his “Elegy on an Unfortunate Lady” and his “Eloisa to Abelard,” were probably written some years before their publication. The Iliad was delivered to the subscribers in instalments in 1715, 1717, 1718, and 1720. For the translation of the Odyssey he took Fenton and Broome as coadjutors, who between them translated twelve out of the twenty-four books. It was completed in 1725. The profitableness of the work was Pope’s chief temptation to undertake it. He cleared more than £8000 by the two translations, after deducting all payments to coadjutors—a much larger sum than had ever been received by an English author before. Pope, with his economical habits, was rendered independent by it, and enabled to live nearer London. The estate at Binfield was sold, and he removed with his parents to Chiswick in 1716, and in 1718 to Twickenham, to the residence with which his name is associated. Here he held his little court, and was visited by his intimates Arbuthnot, Gay, Bolingbroke (after his return in 1723), and Swift (during his brief visits to England in 1726 and 1727), and by many other friends of political eminence. Martha Blount, after his mother’s death in 1733, was occasionally domiciled in his house.

The translation of Homer established Pope’s reputation with his contemporaries, and has endangered it ever since it was challenged. It was the Homer chiefly that Wordsworth and Coleridge had in their eye when they began the polemic against the “poetic diction” of the 18th century, and struck at Pope as the arch-corruptor. They were historically unjust to Pope, who did not originate this diction, but only furnished the most finished examples of it. Mr Leslie Stephen has asked in what the much abused pseudo-poetic diction consists. A long analysis would be required to answer the question in detail, but in substance i

In dealing with a subject in which the evidence is frequently ambiguous and conflicting, and sometimes of more than doubtful genuineness, and with a period of much obscurity, no amount of research will often serve to point to more than a conjectural conclusion. But, inasmuch as it is on the basis of the assumptions involved in the above theory that the claims of the Church of Rome mainly rest, it will be desirable to state, as concisely as possible, the main facts and arguments on which those who deny these assumptions ground their contrary opinion.

The question whether or no St Peter was designed for pre-eminence among the apostles resolves itself, it is evident, into one of New Testament criticism; but from the time of Origen, who visited Rome early in the 3d century, when the theory first began to be put forward, there has always been a certain section in the church who have distinctly repudiated the affirmative assumption. “For if,” says Origen, “you hold that the whole church was built by God on· Peter alone, what will you say concerning John, the son of thunder, and each of the other apostles?” (Migne, Patrologia Graeca, xiii. 397). Next, as regards the evidence for St Peter’s presence in Rome and lengthened labours there, as the head of a Christian congregation, it is maintained by the great majority of Protestant scholars that there is no proof that he was ever in Rome at all; that the “Babylon” referred to in his first epistle (ch. v. 13) is really the distant city of the East; and that, even if his presence in Rome be admitted, his arrival there must have been long subsequent to that of his brother apostle, and his labours altogether subordinate in importance,—conclusions supported by the complete silence observed in the Acts of the Apostles respecting both him and his work in the capital of the empire. On the other hand, it is urged that, as no known tradition assigns the martyrdom of Peter to any other place than Rome, every allusion to that event is implicitly an argument for his visit to the capital; and, generally speaking, it may be said that the most recent and authoritative research seems to point to the conclusion that he both visited Rome and taught there, but that his labours were carried on in a spirit of rivalry, not to say antagonism, to those of Paul, being bestowed exclusively on a Judaizing church, while those of his fellow-apostle were devoted to the Gentile community. Of the important feature which harmonizes perfectly with these conclusions—namely, that the Church of Rome, attaching itself directly to the church at Jerusalem, became the depositary of a Jewish-Christian rather than of a Pauline tradition—there can be no doubt whatever.

The existence of a considerable poor Jewish element in Rome as early as the latter half of the 1st century is attested by numerous facts and allusions in the classical writers. The Jews were everywhere actively engaged in commercial pursuits, and formed an influential section in all great centres. Josephus tells us that, when on one occasion the Jews of Palestine presented a petition to the emperor Augustus, it was supported by no less than eight thousand of their countrymen resident in the capital. The chief quarters of this Jewish colony were in the Trastevere, about the base of the Janiculum; and its members were distinguished by the fidelity with which they cherished their national customs and beliefs. Both Rome and the Jewish community in its midst must accordingly have appeared a field of primary importance in the work of evangelization; and it is evident that the questions raised by the claims of Christianity would there be discussed with the greatest ardour, and the most strenuous endeavours be made to bring them to an ultimate issue. That such was really the case is sufficiently proved by a well-known passage in Suetonius, who relates that about the middle of the 1st century there were constant riots among the Jewish population, their ringleader being one “Chrestus,” and that Claudius in consequence expelled them from the city. There is no reason for supposing that this section of the community would be estranged to any great degree, by the pursuits and associations of their daily life, from those by whom they were surrounded. The influences that then pervaded alike the Roman literature, culture, and civilization were mainly Greek, and the Jewish element was no less affected by these influences than the Latin. Greek, again, was the ordinary medium of commercial intercourse throughout the Roman world, and the Jew was largely engaged in commerce. Greek therefore had, except in the Syrian provinces, become the language of his daily life, as it had long been that of his sacred books read aloud in the synagogues, and of the annals of his race as recorded by the national writers.

The importance of the passage above referred to in Suetonius, of which the very inaccuracy which it embodies is in itself highly significant, has perhaps hardly been sufficiently recognized, for it not only records an important fact but it sheds light on subsequent history. It enables us to understand that, when the Jewish population was permitted to return to Rome, its members, whether adherents of the national faith or converts to the new, would, in common with the whole Christian community, feel the necessity of extreme caution lest their religious observances or their religious differences should again attract the notice of the Rofhan magistrate and expose them to fresh persecution. Of this character would appear to be the sentiments indicated in the epistle of Clemens Romanus (supposed by some to have been the same with the Clemens whose name is inserted as that of the third bishop of Rome) when he refers to the sudden and repeated “calamities and adversities which are befalling us”—a passage generally interpreted as having reference to the persecution under Nero and the impending persecution under Domitian (Lightfoot, Append., p. 267). In such considerations as these we may fairly consider that we have a reasonable explanation of the fact that during the first two centuries of its existence we hear so little of the Christian church in Rome.

With such considerations before us, it is scarcely necessary to point out that Greek was also the language of the early Christian church in Rome. In whatever proportions, therefore, that church was composed of Christianized Jews or of Christianized pagans, its records would naturally be, as we find them to have been, in the Greek language. Hegesippus, “the father of church history,” makes a statement which is generally understood to imply that, being in Rome in the time of Anicetus (bishop 155- 168 A.D.), he made a list of the bishops of the see. This list is not extant; but in Irenaeus, who wrote his Adversus Heereses a few years later, we have another Greek list of twelve bishops, which shows the succession accepted at Rome in the time of Eleutherius, the contemporary of Irenaeus, and at the head of which stand the names of both Peter and Paul. To these lists are to be added two other Greek lists, the one in the Chronicon of Eusebius, the other in the Ecclesiastical History of the same writer. Of these, the former extends from Peter to Gaius (the last bishop before the Diocletian persecution), and gives the periods of office. It is derived from the Armenian translation, but is not contained in the version by Jerome. The first Latin list, the Catalogus Liberianus, — supposed by Mommsen to have been derived from the Chronicon, of Hippolytus, bishop of Portus, and to have been in turn the original from which the Catalogus Felicianus (the oldest existing version of the Liber Pontificalis, — see infra} was taken,—is so called because it was compiled in the episcopate of Liberius, who succeeded 352 a.d. We have also two other Latin lists of some authority, in Augustine (Epist. 53; Migne, Patrol., xxxiii. 195) andin Optatus (De Schism. Don., ii. 3).

It is undeniable that in all the foregoing lists there are considerable discrepancies. The Liberian catalogue gives us a certain “Cletus,” as the immediate predecessor of Anacletus; scholars like Mommsen and Lipsius are divided in opinion as to whether Anicetus was the predecessor or the successor of Pius; while, as regards the duration of each episcopate, there are equally important discrepancies. But difficulties like these cannot justly prejudice our acceptance of the general tradition with which they are associated; they are rather to be looked upon as supplying valuable incidental evidence with respect to the status of the Roman episcopate; and, while the lists themselves prove, on the one hand, that before the termination of the 3d century the office was held to be of such importance that its succession was a matter of interest to ecclesiastics living in distant sees, the variations that the lists present indicate not less clearly that the Roman bishopric at this period could not have held that position in relation to the church—the parallel to that of the imperial office in the empire—claimed for it by writers like Bellarmine.

The comparative history of institutions would, in itself, incline us to look for a less precise and exalted conception of the office, as discharged by these early bishops, than when, after a lapse of centuries and a succession of varied experiences, its duties and responsibilities had become defined and developed; but it is also a fact of considerable significance that thöse who were elected to the office from the time of Clement were for the most part men whose very names would probably not have survived but for their appearance in these lists, and that, even when, in one or two instances, their individual careers emerge from the general obscurity, they themselves appear as speaking and acting in a manner which seems hardly compatible with those exalted prerogatives which, as some maintain, were inherent in the office from its first commencement. In: the recently recovered portion of the epistle of Clemens Romanus, above cited, it is, for example, highly significant to find that the letter purports to emanate, not from the “bishop of Rome,” but from “the church at Rome,” and to find again that, even so late as the 2d century, this letter is in like manner referred to as emanating from the community, and not from the individual. This feature, indeed, is not a little suggestive with respect to the development of the Roman supremacy. While the letter is wanting in anything that implies any special pre-eminence on the part of the Roman bishop, it is at the same time characterized by a certain admonitory tone, such as could hardly have been assumed if the community by whom it was sent had not been held to possess a recognized superiority over the community to whom it is written, but this superiority is not greater than would naturally belong (notwithstanding their common founder) to the church in imperial Rome as contrasted with the church at subject Corinth,—to the church of the august capital from whence emanated the laws which governed the empire and the church of the fallen city which, two centuries and a half before, the Roman arms had well nigh effaced from existence.

If again we accept as genuine the evidence afforded in * those seven letters of Ignatius which most critics are disposed to accept as genuine, the relations of the Roman Church to the other churches of the empire appear to be of the same character. Ignatius, when on his way to Rome (probably early in the 2d century) to suffer martyrdom, addressed a letter to the Christian community in that city. In this letter there is again an equally direct reference to a certain primacy of the church in Rome, which is addressed as “she who hath the presidency in the place of the region of the Romans.” But this expression is immediately followed by a definition of this primacy which is altogether incompatible with the theory that it is derived from the episcopal succession in the church; it is spoken of as founded upon sentiments of Christian fellowship, with the additional considerations attaching to the dignity and superior advantages belonging to the church of the capital.

The conclusion to which the foregoing evidence points is again strongly confirmed by the general fact that, as each new pretension on the part of the Roman see was put forward, it was called in question and repudiated by some one or other section of the Christian community. An obscure and doubtful passage in Irenaeus {Adv. Haeres., bk. iii. c. 3) testifies, at most, to nothing more than a fuller recognition of the primacy of the Roman Church, while in the same writer, who, it will be remembered, was bishop of the church at Lyons, we have a notable instance of a distinct repudiation of the claims of the Roman bishop to dictate to the bishops of other dioceses. This was ,on the occasion of a sentence of excommunication which Victor I. (c. 190-202 a.d.) had pronounced upon certain bishops in the province of Asia Minor, on account of their refusal to celebrate Easter at the particular time enjoined by the church in Rome. Victor appears not to have had recourse to this extreme measure until after he had consulted with his episcopal brethren in Palestine, Pontus, Gaul, and Corinth; but Irenaeus, notwithstanding, remonstrates boldly with him on the rigour of his proceeding, and on the impolicy of thus cutting himself off from an important section of the church on a mere matter of ceremonial observance. We find again Tertullian, who during his residence in Rome had acquired a certain practical knowledge of the administrative characteristics of its church, implicitly intimating his disapproval in his treatise De Pudicitia (sec. i.) of the assumption by the Roman bishop of the titles of “pontifex maximus” and “episcopus episcoporum”; in another of his treatises {De Virgin, veland., Migne, Patrol., pp. 767-8), he distinctly impugns the claim made by Zephyrinus (202-218) of a certain superiority in the Roman see derived as a tradition from St Peter.

The evidence with which we are presented for the rest of the 3d century is of a similar character. Callistus (218-223), the successor to Zephyrinus, was originally a Christian slave in Rome during the bishopric of Victor, who (if we accept the narrative of Hippolytus) had been sent on account of his turbulence and dishonest practices to the mines in Sardinia. Victor, who was acquainted with the circumstances of his career, deemed him, notwithstanding, so little deserving of commiseration that, when, through the influence of Marcia, the mistress of the emperor Commodus, he had succeeded in bringing about the liberation of a certain number of Callistus’s Christian fellow-sufferers in Sardinia, he did not include in the list the name of Callistus himself. The latter, however, managed to regain his freedom, and ultimately himself became bishop of Rome. During his brief episcopate his administration, as well as that of his predecessor Zephyrinus, was unsparingly criticized by Hippolytus, the well-known bishop of Portus. Against Callistus Hippolytus alleges the greatest laxity in the admission of candidates to ecclesiastical orders, and also undue connivance at marriages dishonourable to those professing the Christian faith; while Zephyrinus is depicted as a man of but little intelligence and of ignoble aims. It is evident that when a suffragan bishop could venture thus to criticize his metropolitan the authority wielded by the latter, even in his own diocese, was very far from meeting with unquestioning obedience.

The foregoing evidence, together with many other similar facts which cannot here be enumerated, points clearly to two important conclusions: first, that in the course of the 2d and 3d centuries the Church of Rome began to put forth unprecedented claims to a certain superiority among other churches; and, secondly, that these claims not unfrequently encountered considerable opposition as novel and unjustifiable.

The circumstances which contributed to bring about their ultimate establishment were various. The Roman Church itself had, from the first, been associated with that severer type of Christian belief which had its chief seat at Jerusalem; and, after the Holy City and its temple were alike razed to the ground by Titus (70 a.d.), much of the reverence which had belonged to Jerusalem was transferred to Rome. In relation to the episcopal office itself, again, it is to be noted that the general conception of its functions underwent, at this period, considerable change. On this point a passage in Jerome (Ad Tit., i. 7) is of special significance. He here expressly attributes the institution of the episcopal order to the necessity which had arisen of repressing the numerous schisms in the church; and he goes on to observe that bishops would consequently do well to bear in mind that their office, with its involved authority over presbyters, was to be regarded rather as the result of custom and tradition than of divine appointment. As regards any special supremacy attaching to the Roman episcopate, the evidence afforded by another passage in Jerome is not less notable. In one of his most important letters (Ad Rusticum ; Migne, Patrol., xxii. 932) he fully recognizes the expediency and value of a central supreme authority, vested in a single individual. In support of his position he adduces examples from the animal kingdom, from the imperial power, from the judicial power, from the military power, and then goes on to say, “so again each church has its one bishop, its one arch-presbyter, its one archdeacon, every ecclesiastical grade relying on its leader,” but to the clenching example, derivable from the supreme pontiff himself, no reference is made. It seems, accordingly, an inevitable inference that by one of the greatest of the Latin fathers, writing at the close of the 4th century, the Roman theory of the popedom was unrecognized. But the circumstance which perhaps most conduced to the acceptance of the papal pretensions was the creation of a new office in the ecclesiastical organization, that of the metropolitan. So long as Christianity was the religion only of an obscure sect, or of a persecuted minority in the Roman state, lying also under the suspicion of political disaffection, it probably sought to avoid attracting further attention to itself by any elaborate attempt at organization. At the same time the political organization of the empire, from its Jong established and universally recognized territorial divisions, its system of intercommunication, and its arrangement of the executive power, must have obviously seemed to furnish the most practicable outlines for the administration of a great and growing ecclesiastical community. The chief cities or metropoleis of the several Roman provinces were accordingly from the first selected as the seats of the principal Christian churches—Antioch, Corinth, Ephesus, and Thessalonica respectively representing the chief ecclesiastical centres of Syria, Achaia, Asia, and Macedonia. And when, again, under Constantine and his successors, the distribution of civil authority was further modified by the creation of four patriarchates, subdivided into twelve “dioceses” or major provinces, these changes were soon followed by corresponding modifications on the part of the church organization. In this manner we are able to understand how it is that we find the bishop of Rome successively assuming, as in the pontificates of Fabianus and Cornelius, the more extended authority of a...