of which no philosopher had ever dreamed. The penalty of that true life was the sacrifice which is the world's Atonement. Men saw the Mortal die. But others saw the Immortal rise to take His place at the right hand of Power: and the Spirit which has been streaming out ever since from that life and death is the world's present Light, and shall be its everlasting Life.

XIII.

THIRD ADVENT LECTURE.

THE BARBARIAN.

"And when they were escaped, then they knew that the island was called Melita. And the barbarous people showed us no little kindness: for they kindled a fire, and received us every one, because of the present rain, and because of the cold. And when Paul had gathered a bundle of sticks, and laid them on the fire, there came a viper out of the heat, and fastened on his hand. And when the barbarians saw the venomous beast hang on his hand, they said among themselves, No doubt this man is a murderer, whom, though he hath escaped the sea, yet vengeance suffereth not to live. And he shook off the beast into the fire, and felt no harm. Howbeit they looked when he should have swollen, or fallen down dead suddenly: but after they had looked a great while, and saw no harm come to him, they changed their minds, and said that he was a god. In the same quarters were possessions of the chief man of the island, whose name was Publius; who received us, and lodged us three days courteously."-Acts xxviii. 1-7.

Of the four divisions of the world at the time of the Advent, two have already been reviewed. The Greek, seeing the right only on its side of beauty, ended in mere intellectual refinement. The artist took the place of God, and genius stood for inspiration. The Roman's destiny was different. His was not the kingdom of burnished brass, but the kingdom of iron. He set out with the great idea of duty and law: exhibited in consequence the austere simplicity of pure domestic life, in public affairs government and order: stamping upon the world the great idea of obedience to law. In the decline of Rome the results of this were manifest. After a mighty career of a thousand years Rome had run out her course. Among the loftier minds who stood out protesting against her corruption, and daring in a corrupted age to believe in the superiority of right to enjoyment, grand contempt for pleasure, sublime defiances of pain told out the dying agonies of the iron kingdom, worthy of the heart of steel which beat beneath the Roman's robe. This was stoi

cism: the Grecian philosophy which took deepest root, as might have been expected, in the soil of Roman thought. Stoicism was submission to a destiny: hard, rigid, loveless submission. Its language was Must. It must be, and man's highest manliness is to submit to the inevitable. It is right. because it must be so. Besides these higher ones, there were others who carried out the idea of duty in quite another direction. With the mass of the nation, reverence for law passed into homage to the symbol of law-loyalty to the Government; its highest expression being the sacramental homage to the nation's authority. So that, as I have already said, the Roman spirit stiffened into stoicism, and degenerated into worship of the emperor. This was not accidental, it was the inevitable result of the idea. It might have taken half the time, or ten times as long; but at last the germ must have ripened into that fruit and no other. The Roman began with obedience to will.

Law, meaning obedience to a holy God, passes by a natural transition into the Gospel: that is, reverential duty to a person becomes the obedience of love at last, which obeys because the beautifulness of obedience is perceived. The Jew began in severity, ended in beauty. The Roman began in severity, ended in rigidity, or else relaxation. To him the Advent came proclaiming the Lord of love instead of the coercive necessity of a lifeless fate.

To the Greek worshipper of beauty, the Advent came with an announcement of an inner beauty. He who was to them, and all such, "a Root out of a dry ground, with no form or comeliness," with nothing to captivate a refined taste, or gratify an elegant sensibility, lived a life which was divine and beautiful. His religion, as contrasted with the Grecian, supplementing it, and confirming in it what was true, "was the worship of the Lord in the beauty of holiness."

The third department is the necessity of the Advent for the Barbarian world.

By Barbarian was meant any religion but the Roman or the Greek—a contemptuous term, the spirit of which is common enough in all ages. Just as now every narrow sect monopolizes God, claims for itself an exclusive heaven, contemptuously looks on all the rest of mankind as sitting in outer darkness, and complacently consigns myriads whom God has made to His uncovenanted mercies, that is, to probable destruction, so, in ancient times, the Jew scornfully designated all nations but his own as Gentiles; and the Roman and Greek, each retaliating in his way, treated all nations but his own under the common epithet of Barbarians.

We shall confine ourselves to-day to a single case of barbarian life. We shall not enter into the religion of our own ancestors, the Celts and Teutonic nations, who were barbarians then, nor that of the Scythians or the Africans. One instance will be sufficient.

Twice in his recorded history St. Paul came in contact with barbarians-twice he was counted as a god. Once among the semi-barbarians of Lycaonia, at Lystra-once here at Melita.

There is a little uncertainty about the identification of this Melita. It was a name shared by two islands-Malta, and Melida in the Adriatic. But it seems to be established beyond all reasonable doubt that it was on Malta, not on Melida, that St. Paul was wrecked. The chief objection to this view is, that immediately before the wreck we are told— chap. xxvii. 27-that they were "driven up and down in Adria." But this is satisfactorily answered by the fact that the name Adriatic was applied often loosely to all the sea round Sicily. Two great arguments in favor of Malta then remain: After leaving the island, the apostle touched at Syracuse, and so went on to Rhegium and Puteoli. This is the natural direction from Malta to Rome, but not from Melida. Then besides," barbarians" will not apply to the inhabitants of Melida. They were Greeks: whereas the natives of Malta, living under Roman government, were originally Carthaginians, who had been themselves a Phoenician colony. The epithet is perfectly correct as applied to them.

It is the Carthaginian or Phoenician religion, then, which moulded the barbarian life, that we examine to-day. We take three points.

I. Barbarian virtues.

II. Barbarian idea of retribution.

III. Barbarian conception of Deity.

I. Barbarian virtues. Two errors have been held on the subject of natural goodness. The first, that of those who deny to fallen man any goodness at all, and refuse to admit even kindliness of feeling. In the language of a celebrated and popular expounder of this view, "man in his natural state is one-half beast and one-half devil." This is the effect of a system. No man in his heart believes that. No mother ever gazed upon her child, baptized or unbaptized, and thought so. Men are better than their creed. Their hearts are more than a match for their false theological system. Beneath the black skin of the African there runs a blood as warm as that which is in the blue veins of the Christian.

Among the civilized heathen, the instinctive feelings are as kindly and as exquisitely delicate as they were ever found in the bosom of the baptized. Accordingly, we find here these natural barbarian virtues of hospitality and sympathy. The shipwrecked mariners, wet and cold, were received in Melita with a warm, compassionate welcome. The people of the island did not say, "Depart in peace, be ye warmed and filled." They gave them those things which were necessary for the body. And a Christian contemplating this, gave this distinct testimony, "The barbarous people showed us no little kindness."

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The second error is the opposite one of placing too high a value on these natural virtues. There is a class of writers who talk much of early unsophisticated times. They tell of the days "when wild in woods the noble savage ran. They speak of pastoral simplicity, and the reverence and piety of mountain life. According to them, civilization is the great corrupter. But the truth is, the natural good feelings of human nature are only instincts: no more moral than a long sight or a delicate sense of hearing. The keen feelings of the child are no guaranty of future principle-perhaps rather the reverse. The profuse hospitality of the mountaineer, who rarely sees strangers, and to whom gold is little worth, becomes shrewd and selfish calculation so soon as temptation from passing traffic is placed in his way. You may travel among savages who treat you, as a stranger, with courtesy, but yet feed on the flesh of their enemies. And these Melitans, who "showed no little kindness" to the wrecked crew, belonged to a stock who, in the most civilized days of Carthage, offered human sacrifice, and after every successful battle with the Romans burnt the chief prisoners alive as a thankoffering to Heaven. If we trace them still farther back, we find their Phoenician ancestors in the Old Testament tainted with the same practice, and the Hebrews themselves imbibing it from them, so as to be perpetually arraigned by their prophets on the charge of making their sons and daughters pass through the fire to Baal." They could be kind to strangers, and cruel to enemies.

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The Advent of Christ brought a new spirit into the world. "A new commandment give I unto you, that ye love one another." That was not the new part. The Melitans would not have disagreed with that. "As I have loved you, that

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that'

ye love one another.” "As I have loved you,' makes all new. So also 1 John ii. 7, 8. So also 1 John ii. 7, 8. The "old commandment" was old enough. Barbarians felt in their hearts. But the same commandment with "true light" shining on it was different indeed.

"Love your neighbor, hate your enemy." Carthaginians obeyed that. Hear the law of love expounded by Himself: “But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you and persecute you. For if ye love them which love you, what do ye more than others? Do not even... (the barbarians). . . the same ?” This is Christianity—that is, the mind of Christ.

Remark, too, the principle on which this is taught. "Thát ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven : for He maketh His sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust." Not upon merely personal authority; not by a law graven on stone, nor even printed in a book, to be referred to, chapter and verse; but on the principle of the imitation of God. His heart interpreted the universe-He read its "open secret," which is open to all who have the heart to feel it, secret to all others. A secret, according to Him, to be gathered from the rain as it fell on the just and the unjust, from the dew of heaven, from the lily, and from the fowls of the air, from the wheat, from every law and every atom. This was His revelation. He revealed God. He spelled for us the meaning of all this perplexing, unintelligible world. He proclaimed its hidden meaning to be Love. So He converted rude barbarian instincts into Christian graces-by expanding their sphere and purifying them of selfishness-causing them to be regulated by principle, and elevating them into a conscious imitation of God in His revealed character.

II. The Barbarian idea of retribution.

The Apostle Paul was one of those who are formed to be the leaders of the world. Foremost in persecution, foremost in Christianity ("nothing behind the chiefest apostles ") foremost in the shipwreck, his voice the calmest, his heart the stoutest, his advice the wisest in the tumult; foremost, too, when all was over, not as a prisoner, but actively engaged for the general good, it is Paul who is gathering the sticks to make the fire. From those sticks a viper sprung and fastened on his hand, and the first impression of the barbarians was, "No doubt this man is a murderer, whom, though he hath escaped the sea, yet vengeance suffereth not to live."

This is the very basis of all natural religion—the idea of the connection between guilt and retribution. In some form or other it underlies all mythologies. The sleepless, never-dying avengers of wrong-the Nemesis who presides. over retribution the vengeance which suffereth not the