of their maturity, knew not the fear of death, nor the need of a contrite heart.

Yet all the while, even in Greece and Rome, the two spectres were only dormant, not driven out. Therefore at last, when the empire of Rome had welded the civilised world into one great society, the nations sat down at leisure for the first time to think and to be miserable, face to face with death and sin. A law-abiding, peace-loving spirit pervaded the world, and the path was clear for the combined action of all civilised nations; but the motive for action seemed to have disappeared. Women of all classes, and all the slaves and poor, are found deserting the old national religions, and resorting to novel rites and strange expiations, if perchance they may discharge their minds of this new uneasy feeling called in Judæa sin. Jugglers, travelling priests, and astrologers make profit of the universal yearning for one glimpse into the secrets of the after world. If it was impossible to secure happiness after death, yet to exist, or at least to be remembered, began now commonly to seem one of the most precious of treasures; and many an inscription still records for us how Tullius or Tullia builds a tomb for himself or herself while living, and leaves an estate to the intent that twice a year, for all time, his freedmen, and their descendants for ever, may sprinkle upon his tomb spring violets or summer roses, and feast together around his sepulchre. Even the poor slave, whose body is thrown by a cruel master to the dogs and crows,

has a provision made for his hard case by his humble burial-club, enacting that in such a case he shall at least receive an imaginary funeral.

Deep down beneath the literary froth of a little noisy bubbling scepticism, the thoughts of the masses of men were more than ever given to religion, turning, now hither now thither, to every god and goddess of the Pantheon for deliverance from their intolerable burdens. But gods and goddesses were dumb. Crowded into cities, or toiling as slaves in gangs upon the lands of a master, the poor and miserable who made up the majority of the empire felt that the old glory had departed for ever from the great gods of Nature: living at a time when heroism was extinct, they found the worship of the ancient heroes no longer helpful. The West turned to the East for deliverance; but Isis and Serapis, imported into Rome, gave no permanent aid. Turning from the blank heaven to earth, men saw there no God more real and powerful than the being who sat upon the one remaining throne, whose will was law throughout the empire, the Master of many legions, whose existence was the peace of the world and the worship of a Tiberius or a Caligula became popular and natural and insuppressible; and Nero found worshippers after his death.

Yet there was still the old question obtruded by the inopportune and ever premature Spectre, which not even an emperor could answer-What is there after death? As long as I live will I hang lamps

To

around thy tomb, says the inscription of a faithful freedman engraved on the master's tombstone: after death-I know not. That plaintive utterance expresses the universal cry of the suffering and toiling classes of the empire. After death we know not. It was with them as with Hamlet: the time was out of joint, and the fear of death puzzled the will and diverted the ancient currents of enterprise. whom should be assigned, cries the imperial poet, the task of propping the falling empire and of expiating its guilt? The poet who put that question had a courtly answer of his own: he looks to the Julian laws for the reformation of the race, and sees the Saviour in Augustus. But if to our imaginary spectator of the changing world this same question had been addressed a few years afterwards, say in the fifteenth year of Tiberius Caesar, he would have been prompted, I think, to an altogether different answer, something after this fashion: Unless men can be delivered from the bondage of death and sin, the development of the civilised world is at an end: whatsoever power therefore shall be able to effect this deliverance, that power will be at one with the governing Power of the world, continuing the work that has been wrought from the beginning.

We might have added, having regard to the past history of the world, that such a deliverance would probably be achieved, if ever, not by a great convulsion or instantaneous revolution, but by quiet means and inobtrusive processes; not by a

recurrence to force, but by appeal to peaceful powers; not by imposing an external law, but by diffusing an internal spirit; not by setting aside all human institutions and habits, but by regenerating them all, and most of all, the institution of the family and the habitual sense of fatherhood. That such a deliverance should ever be effected by a single human being would perhaps have seemed to us impossible: but if it had been predicted to us that assuredly one Man would accomplish this great task, revivifying the sense of fatherhood, destroying the weight of sin, and blunting the sting of death, and that He would do all this by calling mankind to come to Himself, to take His yoke upon them, and to accept Him as the source of forgiveness and as the sustenance of their higher life, then we should have unhesitatingly replied that such a human Being must be, though human, yet in some sense divine, and at one with the governing Power of the world. What else we should believe about Him belongs to the second drama of the trilogy, and we are at present witnessing only the first drama, the Work of the Word not yet made flesh.

THE WORD MADE FLESH.

The Word was made flesh.-ST. JOHN 1. 14.

WE have spoken of the history of the world before the coming of Christ as being a kind of ascent of worship. Now we are to speak of the coming of Christ as introducing the highest worship of all; a worship which has raised many generations of men, but which will need many centuries more before men can rise (if ever) to the full height of it; a worship that (in some form or other) is natural for every healthy human heart, and necessary for every heart that would attain health; a worship free from intellectual doubtings and disputations, because it rests upon simple and verifiable spiritual axioms. What would we not give in these days for a simple religion!

To be rid for ever of religious controversies; to be uplifted from the dusty atmosphere of polemical turmoil to the higher level of some safe and natural worship where one can breathe the fresh free air of peace, faith, hope, and love, so that flinging all doubt to the winds we may concentrate all our

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