into itself, and at once ratifies and consecrates it by a Divine and perpetual sanction.

Christianity thus enlarges the area of motive, and widens it to the whole nature of man. In its absence civilization can only appeal to interest and self-love. But on this ground it is open to a retort apparently unanswerable. A man may reply, "I prefer my barbarism to your civilization. It suits my taste better, and on a deliberate calculation of gain and loss, I believe that I shall secure a larger amount of pleasure and enjoyment by a life of wandering idleness, and freedom from all restraint, than I shall by treading all my days the dull routine of respectable industry and order." No effective answer can be given to such a reply. If you tell him that the moral and mental pleasures he loses belong to a higher sphere and are better worth having beyond all comparison than the bodily sensations, he only retorts that he does not think so. If you talk to him about the dignity of his nature, he tells you that he does not care for it. As a question of merely human philosophy, he may not be far wrong; for we are creatures of habit, and many a sceptical school has been unable to find any firmer basis for morals than the instincts of nature, the jus naturæ of Spinosa. If in despair you urge that he owes it to his fellow-men to sacrifice his own inclination to the good of the race, you only fall back on a plea, proved by experience to be as powerless against the active impulses of passion as a barrier of straw against the rush of a swollen river. Thus the human motive fails, simply because it does not appeal to the entire nature of man. But Christianity brings another and a mightier force. The dogmas of our created dependence, our responsibility, and of the resurrection, judgment, heaven and hell, at once enlighten conscience, and abash passion by the majesty of God and the tremendous issues of an eternity.

Lastly, in the act of enlarging the area of motive, Christianity increases likewise the acting force within the soul. The human motive can bring no more than a human influence. It employs one part of the soul to control another part. It thus does no more than divide self against self, and initiate a doubtful conflict where the slightest circumstances may press down the balance in either direction, and turn the fortunes of the dubious battle we know not how. But Divine truth brings with it the promise of a Divine Spirit, working in and through the human understanding, conscience, and affections, and investing them with supernatural strength.

The sceptic cannot deny this. If he rejects the dogma of the operations of God the Holy Ghost, and considers it to be no more than the effect of fanaticism, he must yet acknowledge it to be a fanaticism of singular power. If the belief be a belief alone, without any objective reality in the facts of the spiritual world, yet the belief may turn the victory, just as in ancient times the superstitious confidence of some struggling army in the assistance of an angelic warrior has turned many a doubtful battle into a glorious victory. The dogma brings a moral advantage, even if it be untrue. But if it be true, as we believe, it supplements human effort with a superhuman energy. Civilization becomes the result of two great factors, the human agency and the Divine. God and man move on together towards a common goal. The wills of the two are concurrent circles; man the secondary instrument, God the efficient agent, and a future empire of righteousness and peace, such as the world never yet has seen, the magnificent and everlasting issue.

Such are the two conflicting opinions contending for the mastery. The one places civilization first in order and influence, and would bring in Christianity to supplement a work already done; the other places Christianity first in

order and influence, believing it to be the sole efficient cause of any true and permanent civilization. Both parties admit the value of Christianity and of civilization, but 'differ upon their relative place and influence. To settle the question we must make appeal to the experience of the past. The history of the world presents us with two civilizations, the heathen and the Christian; the one rested on reason, the other rests on revelation; the one was sceptical, the other is dogmatic; the one in its origin and instruments was human, the other we believe to be Divine. must examine and compare the two. The differences are as palpable as they are significant.

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The heathen civilization presents itself first. This is confessed to be undogmatic, because it was not based on a positive revelation, and in its absence men could discover no positive system of truth for adoption. The state of mind produced by the long series of philosophies which in successive waves had swept over the world of thought, was an almost absolute and universal scepticism. In this condition Christianity found mankind. That it was no rebound from excessive authority, no rebellion of the free intellect against the bonds of dogmatic restraint, is certain from the methods of ancient philosophic teaching. It is impossible, for instance, to imagine any thing more unlike dogma than the entire structure of the Platonic Dialogues, alike as regards the opinions advanced and the method of advancing them. Free inquiry had the most unlimited scope, and the death of Socrates is no exception. His condemnation was due less to the freedom of his inquiry than to their results upon the popular religion and his own unbending independence in maintaining them [4]. Not only was thought free, but in its freedom it ran in exactly the direction of the free thought of our own day. The modern opponents of dogma only re-echo the thought, and almost the language, of their ancient prototypes. The assertion of

an universal and primitive religion surviving unchanged beneath the variations of doctrine; the sufficiency of the human reason; the necessity for free inquiry to correct what was deemed the superstitious belief in the supernatural; the eternity of matter; the constancy of law and order superseding the possibility of Providence or revelation-the koivoì TÓTTо of modern Rationalism, were all of them known and urged by the ancients. Free thought had every possible advantage, and the civilization amid which it lived and flourished should accordingly, if its claims were true, have contained the abiding elements of human happiness and progress. The stern evidence of the facts compels a very different conclusion.

It is exceedingly difficult to realize the civilization of the ancients. The difficulty does not arise from the difference of their climate to ours, and the corresponding difference of their manners and habits; for it is not impossible to make the necessary allowances for these conditions. It would be palpably absurd to measure the houses and domestic arrangements, or the meals and dress of the burning East, of sunny Greece, and of imperial Rome, by the standard of Western Europe in our own times. In these particulars the ancients followed the conditions of country and climate at least as sensibly, perhaps more so, than we do ourselves. But the difficulty arises from the almost total absence in the ancient civilization of that moral element which constitutes the very heart and life of the modern.

The absence was entirely natural, when morals were a theory of philosophy and not a solemn obligation of conscience; when the popular mythology was an exaggerated caricature of human nature in its vices and its sorrows; and when actions, esteemed among ourselves too detestable to be named, constituted part of the services of religion. The philosophic few doubtless looked down with contempt

on the folly of the popular belief; but there is no evidence that they detested the wickedness of the popular practice. It is certain that the most illustrious men of heathendom considered the deepest crimes in the Christian code to be venial and excusable, if they were not even laudable. Plato's Dialogues contain indisputable evidence on this subject [5].

The absence of the moral element was therefore no more than natural; and yet it separates the two civilizations by such an abyss of difference that imagination can hardly cross it. The result is to lower our ordinary estimate of the past below the truth. A state of society where the idea of moral purity was unknown; where the relation between the sexes had no religious safeguards; where women were so degraded that friendship scarcely existed except between men; where domestic virtue was allied with ignorance, and intellect with such splendid infamy as to fill the mouth of mankind; where any bond of common humanity was unknown, human life frightfully cheap, and human suffering regarded with such dreadful indifference as to supply sport to the gentle and refined,—such a state of society differs so wholly from what we are accustomed to, that we cannot realize it. The result is that, finding the ancients so immeasurably below us in the moral element, we are apt to think them equally below us in all others. Thus we fail to appreciate their civilization, and are apt to consider it much less complete and wonderful than it was. This is a great mistake.

It is certain that if we put morals on one side, with all the direct and indirect influences associated with them, ancient civilization was a splendid achievement. In external circumstances it reached a height of refinement, or rather sank into a depth of selfish luxury, unknown among ourselves. If on one side their domestic habits appear rude to our notions of comfort, the exquisite and genial tempera