our Lord Jesus Christ, that there would be contention over the name of bishop. For this reason, being possessed of complete foreknowledge, they appointed the above -mentioned men, and then made a decree that, when these men died, other reliable men should take over their office.’ By the time Ignatius of Antioch wrote his letter, perhaps twenty years later, the hierarchical order had developed further , and clergy were divided into grades: the bishop, the council of the presbyters, and the deacons. Ignati us, who may well have written hymns and introduced antiphonal singing to the Church, used a musical image: only if all performed their parts as allotted, would the essential unity of the Church be preserved. By this stage, as we see from the pastoral epistles, the primitive democracy of the eschatological period had gone: the congr egation had lost its freedom, the bishops taught authorized truth and office was seen as the instrument by which the apostolic tradition was to be preserved. The authority of the bishop was then buttressed, as we have seen, by the compilation of Episcopal lists going back to the apostolic foundations. All such Churches produ ced their list, and no one Church alone had to bear the burden of proving that its teaching was the one originally given. Thus the Churches established intercommunion and mutual defense against heresy, on the basis of the monarchical episcopate and its apostolic genealogy. | With the episcopate established as the unifying principle in the Church, the way was open for fresh developments. The idea of succession, originally stressed to safeguard belief in the tradition, was detached from its setting and used to create a doctrine of spiritual office. Tertullian saw this in legal terms: the bishops were ‘heirs’ to spiritual property. And part of their property was that their authority was valid everywhere because they became special people by virtue of their office. How did they become heirs? The answer was shortly supplied by Hippolytus of Rome, writing early in the third century, with the notion of a special sanctifying power in Episcopal consecration. This service, he argued, was the means by which bishops, like the apostles before them, were endowed with the threefold authority of the high priesthood, the teaching, and the office of ‘watchman’. They could be ordained only by other bishops - thus for the first time a sacral differentiation was made in consecration rites. The creation of an international Church, moving slowly from doctrinal diversity to the semblance of orthodoxy, based on an agreed canon and underpinned by the institution of the bishops, was essentially the work of the second century. This was pragmatical work, evolved in response to the collapse of the eschatological hope, and during a fierce and continuous battle against heresy; theory was made up to rationalize and justify change rather than to advance it. The character the Church - or rather the increasingly victorious trend within the Church - was acquiring was empirical and inclusive; it tended to reject one-sided ideological interpretations. Thus Marcion, the ultra-Pauline, and Tertullian, the defender of charismatics, found themselves outside. This policy paid, even at the sacrifice of splendid talents. It meant that the Church, operating on the principle of collective commonsense, was a haven for a very wide spectrum of opinion. In the West, diversity was disappearing fast; in the East, orthodoxy was becoming the largest single tradition by the early decades of the third century. The Church was now a great and numerous force in the empire, attracting men of wealth and high education. Inevitably, then, there occurred a change of emphasis from purely practical development in response to need, to the deliberate thinking out of policy. This expressed itself in two ways: the attempt to turn Christianity into a philosophical and political system, and the development of controlling devices to prevent this intellectualization of the faith from destroying it. The twin process began to operate in the early and middle decades of the third century, with Origen epitomizing the first element and Cyprian the second. If Paul brought to the first generation of Christians the useful skills of a trained theologian, Origen was the first great philosopher to rethink the new religion from first principles. As his philosophical enemy, the anti-Christian Porphyry, summed it up, he introduced Greek ideas to foreign fables' - that is, gave a barbarous eastern religion the intellectual respectability of a philosophical defense. Origen was also a phenomenon. As Eusebius put it admiringly, ‘even the facts from his cradle are worth mentioning’. Origen came from Alexandria, the second city of the 34