points of revealed religion and Roman, as marked before. Judaism began from law or obligation to holy person. Roman religion began from obedience to a mere will. Judaism ended in Christianity; whose central principle is joyful surrender to One whose Name is Love. The religion of Rome ended, among the nobler, as Cato and the Antonines, in the fatalism of a sublime but loveless Stoicism, whose essential spirit is submission to a Destiny: among the ordinary men, in mere zeal for the state, more or less earthly. It stiffened into Stoicism, or degené rated into public spirit.

4. The last step we notice is the decline of Religion into expediency. It is a startling thing to see men protecting popular superstitions which they despise taking part, with solemn gravity, in mummeries which in their heart they laugh at. Yet such, we are told, was the state of things in Rome. It is a trite and often-quoted observation of a great Roman, that one minister of religion could scarcely meet another without a smile upon his countenance, indicating consciousness of a solemn mockery. And an instance of this, I believe, we have in the Acts of the Apostles. The town-clerk or magistrate of Ephesus stilled the populace by a kind of accommodation to their prejudices, much in the same way in which a nurse would soothe a passionate child. Appa rently, as we are told, he belonged to the friends of Paul; and we can scarcely forbear a smile at the solemn gravity with which he assures the people that there could be no doubt that the image fell down from Jupiter: no question throughout all Asia and

the world about the greatness of the "great goddess Diana.??

For there were cultivated minds which had apprehanded some of the truths of Christianity: philoso phers who were enlightened far beyond their age. But a line of martyred philosophers had made them cautious. They made a compromise. They enjoyed their own light, kept silence, and left the rest in darkness. The result was destruction of their own moral being; for, the law of truth is that it cannot be shut up without becoming a dead thing, and mortifying the whole nature. Not the truth which a man knows, but that which he says and lives, becomes the soul's life. Truth cannot bless except when it is lived for, proclaimed, and suffered for.

This was the plan of the enlightened when the Saviour came. And this is the lowest step of a nation's fall, when the few who know the truth refuse to publish it; when governments patronize superstition as a mere engine for governing; when the ministers of religion only half believe the dogmas which they teach, dare not even say to one another what they feel and what they doubt, dare not be true to their convictions for fear of an Ephesian mob.

Therefore it is necessary that One should come who should be True; the Truest of all that are woman-born; whose life was Truth; who from Everlasting had been The Truth. It was necessary that He should come to preach the Gospel to the poor; to dare to say to the people truths which the philosophers dared not say, and other truths of which no philosopher had dreamed: The penalty of that true Life was the sacrifice which is the world's Atone

ment. 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.

[Preached December 20, 1849.]

THIRD ADVENT LECTURE

THE BARBARIAN.

Acts xxviii. 1--7. "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."

Or 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 Stoicism: 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 inevi table. 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