Philip Schaff

“ Thus, Hippolytus, once “torn to pieces as by horses,” in his works, if not in his person, comes to life again in our times, to shed new light upon the history of Latin Christianity, and to show that Rome had no place nor hand in its creation. He appears as a Greek Father in a church which was yet a “Greek colony;” ”

“ The formation of Latin Christianity in the school of North Africa seems interrupted by the interpolation, between Tertullian and his great pupil Cyprian, of a Western bishop and doctor, who writes in Greek. A little reflection, however, will suggest to the thoughtful student, that, even if our chronological plan admitted of it, we should divest the works of Cyprian of a very great advantage should we deprive them of the new and all-important light shed upon Cyprian and his conflicts with Stephen by the discovery of the Philosophumena of Hippolytus. ”

“ We are pausing for a moment, in the North-African history, to take a contemporary survey of Rome, and to mark just where it stands, and what it is, at this moment. The earliest of the great Roman Fathers now comes forward, but not as a Latin Father. He writes in Greek; he continues the Greek line of thought brought into the West by Irenæus; he maintains the Johannean rather than the Petrine traditions and idioms, which are distinct but not clashing; he stands only in the third generation from St. ”