cils. Both have misinterpreted the texts and have drawn false conclusions from them; it would be sufficient to set them the one against the other in order to confound them. The only facts proved by the texts are the following:
First. St. Peter was the first among the Apostles; but this title gave him no authority.
Secondly. Peter coöperated with St. Paul in founding the Church of Rome.
Thirdly. This Church is consequently an Apostolic see.
The advocates of papal authority would conclude from these facts, that the Bishops of Rome, as successors of St. Peter, have inherited that Apostle's prerogatives. But the texts prove neither the prerogatives of Peter nor their descent to the Bishops of Rome. That Bishop is no more the heir of St. Peter than of St. Paul. He merely holds his bishopric in the same church where those Apostles exercised their apostleship. Peter and Paul died at Rome, but if by their death they glorified the Church, non constat that they have bequeathed their apostolate any more than the other apostles have bequeathed theirs to the churches in which they died. Those prerogatives which were intended to be perpetuated in the Church, have been transmitted not by the death of the Apostles, but by ordination. It is to this end that they ordained and established bishops in all the churches they founded; at Rome as much as anywhere else. Accordingly, as appears from the records of the first centuries, the first Bishop of Rome was Linus, and not St. Peter. The Roman episcopate, therefore, only dates back to Linus, and that episcopate draws its origin from the Apostolate; from Paul first, who ordained the first two bishops, then from Peter, who ordained Clement, who was chosen to fill the see of Rome after the death of Anencletus, and long after Peter's death. The Bishops of Antioch are traced in precisely the same manner
