Introduction

As befitted the religion of a new and deep and universal brotherhood, Christianity from its first diffusion wove new ties between sundered classes and distant nations and created a fresh and urgent need for intercourse and for communication. Its earliest literature was epistolary and its chief missionary the prince of letter—writers, whose correspondence, early deemed canonical, set an example and provided a model for the following Christian generations. The centuries of persecution may have diminished, though they did not stem, the stream of letters that flowed across the Mediterranean from Church to Church, and in the Christian literature of that time no names are better known than those of Ignatius, Barnabas, Clement, Polycarp, Irenaeus, Dionysius of Corinth, Origen, Dionysius of Alexandria, and Cyprian—letter-writers all. When peace was won and the Church recognized, Christian development on all sides was rapid, until, in the half-century following Julian’s failure to revive and restore the glories of ancient paganism, Christian literature in both East and West, and with it Christian “epistolary converse,” as its devotees loved to call it, reached its patristic Golden Age.

There was, indeed, much to challenge and to stimulate the eager and observant Christian mind, and to