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556 formed out of recognition by the Hellenic movement. Thus they had been tlung into a state of bewilderment before Christianity appeared as a new claimant for their faith, with the result that the gospel won its way among them with the more ease. Meanwhile, in the Hellenised north Christianity was adopted and adapted by the specific culture of the age, and, whether in heretical Gnosticism or more orthodox Origenism, it there appeared with peculiarities that were never appreciated up the Nile. The consequence was a difference between the purely Coptic churches of the south and the Græco-Egyptian Church of Alexandria. At a later time we shall see this distinction emphasised by doctrinal divisions when the Byzantine party obtains influence at Alexandria and makes that city the seat of the Melchites, while the Copts hold their own position in the south. It is in the churches of the Nile valley that we have the real root and spring of the genuine old Coptic Church. These Copts cared little for the enlightened Alexandrian theology. Their literature consisted of the Bible and tales of saints and martyrs.

The Church in Egypt has the terrible but heroic distinction of being the most repeatedly and continuously persecuted body of Christians all down the ages of history, from the second century almost to our own day. These much tried people endured at least their full share of persecution under the Romans during the two or three centuries when Christianity was always illegal and at intervals fiercely assailed. Neale says that the Dominitian persecution does not appear to have reached Egypt, but that possibly there was some persecution there under Trajan. But the first persecution of which we have any information is that under Septimius Severus, which was concentrated with exceptional severity in this province, when Leonidas, the father of Origen, suffered martyrdom, a persecution to which the romantic story of Potamiciena belongs. Till this period the history of the Church is a blank. The Decian, which was the first of the really great persecutions deliberately designed to destroy