s to put before us. He draws an
elaborate picture of the Jews and Jewish quarter of Rome--a "longshore
population" of beggars and pedlars, with a Ghetto resembling the
Alsatia of _The Fortunes of Nigel_, seething with dirt and fanaticism.
These were St. Peter's congeners at Rome, whose ideas and claims,
"timid trimmer" though he was, he came to Rome to support against the
Hellenism and Protestantism of St. Paul. And at Rome they, both of
them, probably, perished in Nero's persecution, and that is the history
of the success of Christianity. "Only fanatics can found anything.
Judaism lives on because of the intense frenzy of its prophets and
annalists, Christianity by means of its martyrs."

But a certain Clement arose after their deaths, to arrange a
reconciliation between the fiercely antagonistic factions of St. Peter
and St. Paul. How he harmonised them M. Renan leaves us to imagine; but
he did reconcile them; he gathered in his own person the authority of
the Roman Church; he lectured the Corinthian Church on its turbulence
and insubordination; he anticipated, M. Renan remarked, almost in
words, the famous saying of the French Archbishop of Rouen, "My clergy
are my regiment, and they are drilled to obey like a regiment." On this
showing, Clement might almost be described as the real founder of
Christianity, of which neither St. Peter nor St. Paul, with their
violent oppositions, can claim to be the complete representative; at
any rate he was the first Pope, complete in all his attributes. And in
accordance with this beginning M. Renan sees in the Roman Church,
first, the centre in which Church authority grew up, and next, the
capital of Catholicism. In Rome the congregation gave up its rights to
its elders, and these rights the elders surrendered to the single ruler
or Bishop. The creation of the Episcopate was eminently the work of
Rome; and this Bishop of Rome caught the full spirit of the Caesar, on
whose decay he became great; and troubling himself little about the
deep questions which exercised the minds and wrung the hearts of
thinkers and mystics, he made himself the foundation of order,
authority, and subordination to all parts of the Imperial world.

Such is M. Renan's explanation of the great march and triumph of the
Christian Church. The Roman Empire, which we had supposed was the
natural enemy of the Church, was really the founder of all that made
the Church strong, and bequeathed to the Church its prero