Many writers on many occasions have perceived and described the important part which

intercommunication between the widely separated congregations of early Christians, whether by travel or by

letter, played in determining the organisation and cementing the unity of the Universal Church. Yet perhaps

all has not been said that ought to be said on the subject. The marvellous skill and mastery, with which all

the resources of the existing civilisation were turned to their own purposes by St. Paul and by the Christians

generally, may well detain our attention for a brief space.

Travelling and correspondence by letter are mutually dependent. Letters are unnecessary until travelling

begins: much of the usefulness and profit of travelling depends on the possibility of communication

between those who are separated from one another. Except in the simplest forms, commerce and negotiation

between different nations, which are among the chief incentives to tra velling in early times, cannot be

carried out without some method of registering thoughts and information, so as to be understood by

persons at a distance.

Hence communication by letter has been commonly practised from an extremely remote antiquity. The

knowledge of and readiness in writing leads to correspondence between friends who are not within

speaking distance of one another, as inevitably as the possession of articulate speech produces

conversation and discussion. In order to fix the period when epistolary correspondence first began, it would

be necessary to discover at what period the art of writing became common. Now the progress of discovery

in recent years has revolutionised opinion on this subject. The old views, which we all used to assume as

self-evident, that writing was invented at a comparatively late period in human history, that it was long

known only to a few persons, and that it was practised even by them only slowly and with difficulty on

some special occasions and for some peculiarly important purposes, are found to be utterly erroneous. No

one who possesses any knowledge of early history would now venture to make any positive assertion as to

the date when writing was invented, or when it began to be widely used in the Mediterranean lands. The

progress of discovery reveals the existence of various systems of writing at a remote period, and shows that

they were familiarly used for the ordinary purposes of life and administration, and were not reserved, as

scholars used to believe, for certain sacred purposes of religion and ritual.

The discovery that writing was familiarly used in early time has an important bearing on the early literature

of the Mediterranean peoples. For example, no scholar would now employ the argument that the

composition of the Iliad and the Odyssey must belong to a comparatively late day, because such great

continuous poems could not come into existence without the ready use of writing--an argument which

formerly seemed to tell strongly against the early date assigned by tradition for their origin. The scholars

who championed the traditional date of those great works used to answer that argument by attempting to

prove that they were composed and preserved by memory alone without the aid of writing. The attempt

could not be successful. The scholar in his study, accustomed to deal with words and not with realities,

might persuade himself that by this ingenious verbal reasoning he had got rid of the difficulty; but those

who could not blind themselves to the facts of the world felt that the improbability still remained, and

acquiesced in this reasoning only as the least among a choice of evils. The progress of discovery has

placed the problem in an entirely new light. The difficulty originated in our ignorance. The art of writing was

indeed required as an element in the complex social platform on which the Homeric poems were built up; but

no doubt can now be entertained that writing was known and familiarly practised in the East Mediterranean

lands long before the date to which Greek tradition assigned the composition of the two great poems.

A similar argument was formerly used by older scholars to prove that the Hebrew literature belonged to a

later period than the Hebrew tradition allowed; but the more recent scholars who advocate the late date of

that literature would no longer allow such reasoning, and frankly admit that their views must be supported