Respecting the correctness of the details given in these accounts, it is impossible with certainty either to affirm or deny. That they substantially record the truth, there cannot be a reasonable doubt; and they thus show, that while the gospel was simultaneously winning its way in Europe, it spread itself eastward "with the rapidity of lightning from Jerusalem to the sun-rising," revealing the mercy of God in Jesus Christ, and announcing, not merely by these holy men, but by a multitude of preachers, whose names have been long forgotten on the earth, the great salvation which is in Him, to a large proportion of the Asiatic nations. Hence Origen, in the third century, could appeal, for the truth of the Christian religion, to the accomplishment of the prophecies that foretold its universal spread. "The church," says he, "is every where visible by its own light, and maintains its oneness, though extended from the east to the west." And Eusebius, employing a similar phraseology, describes the doctrine of the Saviour, with a celestial influence and co-operation, irradiating, like the sunbeams, the human race; the word of the inspired evangelists so going throughout the earth, and their words to the end of the world, that, in rural villages and towered cities alike, there arose the innumerable temples of the living God.
ANTIOCH.
The city of Antioch, (Antiochia Magna,) on the river Orontes, was founded three hundred years before the Christian era. In its most prosperous days it consisted of four component towns, of which the first had been built by Triptolemus, with the name of Iona; the second by Casus, who brought hither a colony of Candiots; and this branch was called Cassiotæ; a third portion was added by a colony of Greeks from Peloponnesus, under
