Page:The Greek and Eastern churches.djvu/581

Rh the other hand, the personal obscurity of St. Mark—apart from his authorship of the Second Gospel—is in its favour. Great ancient churches were eager to trace their origin to apostles. When Antioch, Alexandria's rival, claimed St. Peter for its founder and first bishop, it is not likely that the Egyptian patriarchate would voluntarily accept a second place by putting in a claim for no more important a person than that very apostle's secretary, unless some undeniable testimony had determined the matter. On this account, therefore, we may admit a shadowy probability that tradition is right here, and that St. Mark really did found the Church of Alexandria.

In Egypt it is usual to refer the Babylon from which the First Epistle of St. Peter is dated to the place of that name on the Nile, near where Cairo now stands, and the seat of an important bishopric in early Christian times. But if the apostle himself as well as his secretary had been living there, how shall we account for the absolute silence of antiquity as to St. Peter's residence in Egypt and its attributing the origin of the Church there only to St. Mark?

Although among the Nile villages Christianity has been suppressed by the Mohammedan tyranny, this melancholy fact should not blind us to the recollection that in early times it found a very fertile field in Upper Egypt. While Alexandria was largely Hellenised, the country parts farther south remained thoroughly Egyptian. The consequence was that the philosophic metamorphosis of the ancient cult, that gave it a new lease of life in the educated Greek area of Egypt, was never accepted or understood among the simpler folk of the rural districts. But conservative as these southern people were, they failed to hold to their old gods when they saw them trans-