There is scarcely anything that is
really fundamental in our lives that was not then created that it
might endure. It was then our religion, the soul of Europe, was born.
Christianity, the Faith, which, little by little, absorbed the empire,
till it became the energy and the cause of all that undying but
changeful principle of life and freedom which rightly understood is
Europe, is thought to have been brought first to Ravenna by S.
Apollinaris, a disciple as we are told of S. Peter, who made him her
first bishop. So at least his acts assert; and though little credence
may, I fear, be placed in them, that he was the first bishop of
Ravenna, and in the time of S. Peter, is not at variance with what we
know of that age, is attested by the traditions of the city, and is
supported by later authorities. S. Peter Chrysologus (_c_. 440), the
most famous of his successors, for instance, assures us of it. This
great churchman calls S. Apollinaris martyr, and in that there is
nothing strange, but he asserts that though he often spilt his blood
for the Faith, yet God preserved him a long time, not less than twenty
years, to his church, and that his persecution did not take away his
life.
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