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 shows how in Bithynia a large part of the population was Christian as early as the year 112, though no Apostle is recorded to have preached there. Tertullian, about the year 200, thus addressed the Emperor: "We are but of yesterday, and we fill all that is yours; your cities, your islands, your military posts; your boroughs, your council chambers, and your camps; the palace, the senate, the forum: your temples alone we leave you" (Apol. C. 37). He testifies in his book against the Jews that the tribes of Africa, Spain, Gaul, Britain; Sarmatians, Dacians, Germans, Scythians; all the peoples of the Latin world in short, had admitted Christ to reign, etc. The same movement in the propagation of Christianity has been going on ever since. All the nations of Europe have thus been converted, and brought to produce the same marvellous fruits of holiness. The work is still going on in America, Africa, Oceanica, Japan, China, Indo-China, Corea, Hindostan, etc. (See "New Glories of the Catholic Church," "Marshall's Christian Missions," etc.) If these supernatural results were produced without the aid of miracles, this, as St. Augustine argues, would be the greatest miracle.

34. It must besides be remarked that conversion to Christianity involved the acceptance of the strictest and naturally most unbearable restraints on all the passions of the human heart: in particular the practice of fasting and humiliation; respect for the sanctity of marriage at times when women were treated as mere slaves, when polygamy, divorce, and public immorality were almost universal, and when all these vices were sanctioned by the example of the great. It is difficult for us to realize the depth of degradation to which morals had sunk just before the spread of Christianity, and that in the very