Page:The early Christians in Rome (1911).djvu/55

 Rome" if he never appeared in Rome before 64? Long before this date the Church of the metropolis had been "founded," had had time to become a large and flourishing Christian community. This estimate of the signal importance of the Church of Rome is based on various testimonies, among which may be ranked the long list of salutations in S. Paul's Epistle to the Romans, written circa  58.

All the various notices of the leading Christian writers of the first and second centuries in all lands carefully style him as such. Paul, it is true, in most, not in all these early writings, is associated with him as a joint founder: this in a real sense can also be understood; for although Paul came at a later date to Rome and dwelt there some two years, the presence of one of the greatest of the early Christian teachers would surely add enormously to the stability of the foundations laid years before. The teaching of the great Apostle of the Gentiles, continued for two years, was, of course, a very important factor in the "foundation work," and was evidently always reckoned as such.

But even then, as we have seen, while the two apostles are frequently joined together as founders in the writings of the early Christian teachers, in several notable instances Peter's work is especially dwelt upon by them.

Then again in the traditional "Memories" preserved to us, some of them of the highest historical value, it is Peter, not Paul, who is ever the principal figure. Paul rarely, if ever, appears in them. Great though undoubtedly Paul was as a teacher of the Christian mysteries and as an expounder of Christian doctrine, it is emphatically Peter, not Paul, who lives in the "memories" of the Roman Christian community.

The place which the two basilicas of S. Peter and S. Paul on the Vatican Hill and on the Ostian Way have ever occupied in the minds and hearts not only of the Roman people, but of all the innumerable pilgrims in all ages to the sacred shrines of Rome, seems accurately to measure the respective places which the two apostles hold in the estimate of the Roman Church.

The comparative neglect of S. Paul's basilica in Rome when measured with the undying reverence shown to, and with the enormous pains and cost bestowed on the sister