Chapter IV. Catholicity. 41 was to be cosmopolitan, embracing all nations and all countries. This is evident from the following passages: "Go ye, therefore, and teach all nations."58 "Go ye into the whole world, and preach the Gospel to every creature."59 "Ye shall be witnesses unto Me in Jerusalem, and in all Judea, and Samaria, and even to the uttermost part of the earth. These prophecies declaring that the Church was to be worldwide and to embrace even the Gentile nations may not strike us today as especially remarkable, accustomed as we are now to meet with Christian civilization everywhere, and to see the nations of the world bound so closely together by social and commercial relations. But we must remember that when they were uttered the true God was known and adored only in an obscure, almost isolated, corner of the earth, while triumphant idolatry was the otherwise universal religion of the world. The prophecies were fulfilled. The Apostles scattered themselves over the surface of the earth, preaching the Gospel of Christ. "Their sound," says St. Paul, "went over all the earth and their words unto the ends of the whole world."61 Within thirty years after our Savior's Crucifixion the Apostle of the Gentiles was able to say to the Romans: "I give thanks to my God through Jesus Christ because your faith is spoken of in the entire world"62 — spoken of assuredly by those who were in sympathy and communion with the faith of the Romans. [031] St. Justin, Martyr, was able to say, about one hundred years after Christ, that there was no race of men, whether Barbarians or Greeks, or any other people of what name soever, among whom the name of Jesus Christ was not invoked. St. Irenaeus, writing at the end of the second century, tells us 58 Matt. xxviii. 19. 59 Mark xvi. 15 60 Acts i .8. 61 Rom. x. 18. 62 Rom. i. 18.