a bishop and ecclesiastical writer belonging to the first half of the third century, whose name has recently acquired distinction and importance in connection with a recovered treatise of great value. The history of this treatise is full of interest. Among various other Greek manuscripts brought from Mount Athos to Paris in 1842, and deposited in the great national library, there was an anonymous one of the fourteenth century, written on cotton paper, and registered as a Book on all Heresies. It failed for some time to attract any special notice; but the attention of M. Emmanuel Miller, a functionary of the institution, being at length excited by some fragments of Pindar, and of an unknown lyric poet which it contained, he was led to examine it more closely, and to adopt the conclusion that it was a lost treatise of Origen. Under this persuasion he offered it for publication to the University of Oxford, from whose press it appeared in 1851, under the editorship of M. Miller, and bearing the title Origenis Philosophumena, sive omnium Haeresium Refutatio. Shortly afterwards it was studied by the Chevalier Bunsen, and after a careful and elaborate investigation it was conclusively established by him to be a genuine work of the third century, and that its real author was not Origen but Hippolytus, a presbyter of the Church of Rome, and bishop of the harbour of Rome, Portus. This conclusion has been confirmed by the combined labours of other scholars, especially of Dr Duncker and Dr Jacobi in Germany, and of Dr Wordsworth in England.

Previous to the recovery of this treatise Hippolytus can be said to have had little more than a mythical existence. His name was indeed a celebrated one in early Christian history. He was known to have been a bishop; but so little else was positively known of him that it remained a matter of uncertainty whether the seat of his labours was in the east or in the west. Neander (C.H., vol. ii., p. 471) considered the evidence on each side to be pretty equally balanced. Yet it appears to us, on the whole, that the evidence clearly inclined in favour of the latter, even before the recent discovery. The conjecture of Le Moyne, that the Portus Romanus associated with the name of Hippolytus was Aden in Arabia,—a conjecture which Cave authoritatively carried out,—Bunsen has plainly shown to have rested on no better foundation than a misinterpretation of one of the passages in Eusebius, in which Hippolytus is mentioned (Euseb., vi. 20). At any rate there can now remain no doubt, after the researches of Bunsen, that the author of the treatise Against all the Heresies—the Hippolytus of Eusebius and Jerome—was bishop of Portus, the new harbour of Rome, on the northern bank of the Tiber, lying opposite to the more ancient Ostia. At this time it had become a place of considerable population and importance—a bustling harbour of all nations. Here Hippolytus lived and laboured. He was a disciple of Irenæus, and his Greek education under that teacher had peculiarly fitted him to act as a sort of missionary bishop among the representatives of the various nations that were here congregated. While occupying a perfectly independent position in his own episcopal sphere of labour, he was at the same time a presbyter of the Roman Church, and shared in the deliberations of the Presbyterial council which met in that city.

In the ninth book of the recovered work, which treats of the heresies prevalent at Rome in Hippolytus's own time, and especially of that of Noetus, patronized by two Roman bishops, Zephyrinus and Callistus, and zealously opposed by Hippolytus, we have a very lively and graphic picture of the ecclesiastical state of Rome in the beginning of the third century. For this, however, the reader must be referred to the treatise itself or to the Chevalier Bunsen's analysis and reproduction of it in his third letter to Archdeacon Hare on the subject, contained in the first volume of his elaborate work on Hippolytus and his Age. His other works survive for the most part only in fragments.

Hippolytus, as he is seen in this work, claims undoubtedly to be regarded as a distinguished father of the Ante-Nicene Church. Of unwavering moral intrepidity, genuine honesty of character, and sense and talents inferior to none of his contemporaries, he was at the same time the predecessor of Origen in speculative power and comprehension, as well as in oratorical pretensions. He combined with more depth and knowledge than his illustrious teacher the philosophical enlightenment which Irenæus had kindled in the west. His familiarity with the course of Grecian speculation was especially serviceable in enabling him to trace the origin of the various heresies to whose refutation he devoted himself. He was the first preacher of note in the Roman Church, having elevated the mere popular exposition of the gospel, which was all that prevailed in the shape of a sermon in that church before his time, into the set homiletic address, characterized by science and eloquence, which "was his favourite mode," according to Bunsen, "of treating exegetical and polemical subjects."