Now here was a place exactly suited to his purpose.

The God of the Old Testament had twice sent down fire from heaven to consume fifty men.

But 'the Son of Man,' said our Saviour, when invited to do the like, 'came not to destroy men's lives but to save them.' Accordingly, Tertullian in his fourth book against Marcion, refuting this teaching, acquaints us that one of Marcion's 'Contrasts' was Elijah's severity in calling down fire from Heaven,--and the gentleness of Christ.

'I acknowledge the seventy of the judge,' Tertullian replies; 'but I recognize the same severity on the part of Christ towards His Disciples when they proposed to bring down a similar calamity on a Samaritan village[568].' From all of which it is plain that within seventy years of the time when the Gospel was published, the text of St.Luke ix.

54-6 stood very much as at present.
But then it is further discovered that at the same remote period (about A.D.