all, the gradual organization of a league embracing all nations, having for its object the promotion and interchange of the blessings of civilization?

We venture to give to this a negative reply. Undoubtedly the religion of nature, whether passive or active, amongst cultivated nations, only furnishes occasion for science and morality to rise higher, and use it simply as a lever; but this is not the case with religion— truth, with an active regenerating religion. By this the powers of civilization are awakened when found dormant, or quickened when they have expired. By this alone is an inexhaustible supply provided for culture, science, and art to work upon, whilst morality and all the bonds of social life are strengthened and secured. This it is, which more than all the powers of war, commerce, conquest, and emigration, is promoting every day the formation of a bond of human brotherhood, embracing all nations and all quarters of the earth. And, therefore, all events, and even all obstructions, all progress, and all rest, must subserve the working of this power, whether the great actors are conscious of it or not. In this sense, then, we speak of the religious character of history, of its religious motives; and describe religion as the one great moving, regulating, and moulding power-the history of the world.

I. The history of the first important epoch is confined to the shores of the Mediterranean Sea, and shows the training and intercourse of the civilized nations of the so-called old world, whose maritime position made them approachable for the purposes of trade, colonization, conquest, and war. Even Africa, though destined for an incalculable period to be condemned to a state of servitude, and excluded from history, was represented in the affairs of the world by Egypt and Carthage. It is true that these nations were not originally African, but so far as their national existence, their power and civilization were concerned, were plants of Asia. Egypt introduced an Indian element-Carthage was of Phoenician origin. The existence of the latter power, great as it was, was so transient that its mission seems to have been to stir up the Romans, in order that its fall might furnish them with the opportunity of rounding off the last great empire of antiquity towards the south west, with a considerable portion of Africa, which afterwards seemed as a connecting link between the East and West. The importance of Egypt, however, gradually dwindled away, except as a place of commerce and barter for the produce of the East, and of classic lands, for all that it produced from its own bosom, was merely a contemplative and world-renouncing mode of life. The classical tribes remained, and so much of the results of more ancient times as was retained in the unity of the Roman empire, which Augustus had brought to completion. The kingdoms of Asia devoured one another. The last of them was absorbed in the Macedonian, the Macedonian in the Roman. In this Pantheon all the gods took refuge; into this ocean all nations flowed, with the exception of the coy and unconquered tribes on the northern and eastern boundaries. But in our sense of the word these tribes

either had not yet acquired or had lost their importance in the history of the world, just as at the present time there are extensive tribes, having their own history no doubt, but which are making no essential contributions to the history of the world.

If now the relation which the gospel assumed to the emperor, who reckoned the Jews as his subjects, and, therefore, numbered Christ amongst them, pointed to a time when Christ should take possession of the Roman empire, and thus religion obtained its rights, it seems to us that the history of the world before the birth of Christ must be left out of our theme. Up to that time the Grecian and Roman mind seems to have taken advantage of the Asiatic. The process was somewhat as follows:-The Asiatic world, by means of Phoenician travellers and colonies, or else through Egypt, supplied the first elements of civilization, both material and spiritual, such as writing, modes of reckoning time, and an abundance of mythical stores. But the Greek remodelled it all. For him man was the measurer of all things. The human form and its beauty he sets forth in his deities. Human thought was truth, in his estimation, and civil liberty and social ties the source and end of morality. Religion was, indeed, a common possession; but aristocratic learning looked upon it as a symbol; the State used it as a tool; it never inspired its efforts to extend and colonize. What the Greeks carried towards Sicily and Italy on the one side, and towards Thrace and the Euxine on the other, was civilization and the arts; the means employed were the wisdom of the State and the world. 'From the gods,' said the Greeks, we have being;' and the Romans repeated their words; but well-being comes from philosophy. And if the Roman State cherished more carefully the ceremonies of religion, it is very certain that the consciousness of its call to rule the world rested not upon religion, but upon civil law and the establishment of peace by national unity. Not only did the Romans not force their gods upon the nations; but they endeavoured, by various means, to entice the local deities to Rome. "The everlasting Rome' was a poetical and political idea of the age of Augustus, but was never an inherent religious thought. Moreover, after it had been uttered, it failed to produce the heroism which such a prediction would have called forth in a nation that felt as sure of its truth as of its own existence. How could prophecy grow out of a religion which suffered philosophy to gain the mastery? The reformers of Greece were not prophets, but philosophers; and when the philosophers of Rome failed to satisfy the wants of the people, they fell into the hands of the so-called mathematicians, or else into those of the priests of Isis, with their traffic in mysteries. This phenomenon in Rome and other cities of the empire has been said to furnish proof of the power of the religions of antiquity to spread and renew their youthful vigour. But the fact is, that the migration of the mysteries of the Attic Ceres, the Egyptian Isis, the Phrygian Cybele, and the Persian Mithras, and their settlement in Rome, as well as the extent to which they gained proselytes from the ranks of the great, prove quite the opposite. They show that neither.

the public religions of the cities, nor the irreligious wisdom of the world, could always satisfy the deeper necessities of either Roman or Greek.

For a long period, even after the commencement of the Christian era, vain attempts were made to revive the worship of the gods; a kind of natural philosophy was engrafted upon it; but these mysteries could not resist the mysteries and revelations of Christ, notwithstanding the bloody persecutions to which the latter were exposed. These also had travelled, it is true, from the heart of a civilized nation, but how different their future, as well as their origin in the past. The people of Israel had reached to their position in history, not by science or art, not by commerce or conquest, but by religion alone. Nor was their own history merely founded and moulded by this power. For the sake of religion they came into existence; by religion they reached an heroic age, and sometimes attained to political greatness. All their state organization was directed to subserve their religion; whereas, among the Greeks and Romans, religion was only subservient to the state. Beyond all example they continued to rise, after they had been for a long period, more or less, tributary and subject to foreigners; and when robbed of their religion, and insulted by the introduction of Grecian idolatry, by a halfwitted Syrian king, the religious enthusiasm of the Maccabean family raised them to an eminence of political independence and grandeur, which attracted many ambassadors from foreign powers to Jerusalem. It was now for the first time that Judaism was properly understood to be the religion of a supernatural God of holiness, who was worshipped without images, and the favours which the Jews at that time enjoyed in their dispersion may principally be traced to this.

The contrast between Jew and Gentile, before the distinction was swept away by Christianity, had an importance in the history of the world of far longer duration than that between Greek and Scythian. The Jew could place by the side of Roman laws an outline of laws much more imperishable, and by the side of Grecian philosophy a prophecy which he held in the name of the whole world. The Jew knew that the religion of his God, who then suffered all nations to walk in their own ways, would bring them all into subjection to the kingdom of his name. But before an actual commencement was made by the mission of Paul, the way had been prepared in the history of the world, by the introduction of the light of revelation into Corinth, Rome, and Ephesus, through the medium of the Jewish synagogues. Christianity traversed the same roads. The Jew is wrong in his opinion that all nations will become Mosaic, and find life and salvation in the books of Moses; but his hope may be transla ed into truth. How are we to explain the fact that the language of Greece, which then ruled the civilized world, learned to speak in Eastern style in the Greek version of the Bible? How was it that the Roman historian, in the very same work in which he spoke so disparagingly of the rude customs and gloomy ceremonies of the

RELIGION IN HISTORY.

Jew, expressed such admiration of his exalted religion? And how can we account for the testimony given by Roman satirists, even when they are ridiculing the habit of observing the Sabbath and visiting the houses of prayer, to the undeniable fact that so many Romans and Greeks of both sexes were wearied with the ancient traditions, and conscious of their inability to satisfy the deep necessities of their souls? In the Acts of the Apostles they are called men that feared God, the devout, and it was they who formed the first nucleus of the Pauline Christian synagogues.

Jews.

Salvation is of the

Nations endowed

This then was the result of ancient history. with strong susceptibility of mind, as the result of classic culture, had been united in one empire, and thus the way had been opened for the spread and reception of Christianity. Still more the forms of thought and language were prepared to receive the new truth which was about to be poured into them. And, what is of greater importance still, there existed as the result of ideal thought and speculation a mass of problems on the most important subjects, which Christianity alone was able to solve. This process is especially apparent in certain men, as, for example, Clement of Rome, Justin, and others, whose strivings after truth went far beyond the limits of the schools of philosophy.

Learning and religion seek each other, and avoid each other too. The former in its worldly shape and fancied self-sufficiency had to become weak and decay. And only so far as it became a servant of the Church was it possible for its language, its literature, its essence, its true worth, to be perpetuated and transmitted to wider circles in later times.

II. The course of history has always been towards the West. The smallest quarter of the globe, in which was the central point of the ancient empire of the world, has become the most productive source But of human development, and after the lapse of a thousand years, is beginning to send forth to all the Indies the fruits of its culture. The answer will help us greatly how did Europe grow to what it is? in our inquiry into the religious forces at work in the history of the world. For who does not think at once of the mutual relation of the Imperial and Papal powers, of the conquests of Islam or the Crusaders, and still more of the spread of Christianity among the German, Celtic, and Selavonic tribes, and the prominence of the history of the Church in the general history of the middle ages?

Let us look, in the first place, at the migrations which took place from the east and north towards the west and south. It was not till they had ceased that the nations settled again into the forms they were to maintain in the general history of the world. The reasons of this impulse to wander are to be traced partly to actual want and a spirit of avarice, but partly also to secret causes, which Providence did not reveal till later times. The Goth Alaric confessed, when standing before the gates of Rome, that he was urged forward by The Christian writers of the fifth century some unknown hand.

speak, it is true, of the judgment of God, which the degenerate Romans had brought upon themselves. And they deduce a long series of proofs, showing that devastating feeling and hatred of civilization are made he instruments of God in the punishment of his house. Huns and Mongols, they say, became to the Christian what the conquerors of Asia had formerly been to the Jew. Attila knew this, and called himself God's scourge. But what further explanations do these church fathers give of the judgments of God? They not only extol the fear of God and the magnanimity which distinguished the Goths, but they say, 'Ye Christians of Marseilles, Aquitania, and Carthage, have to learn from the barbarians what virtue, temperance, and chastity are.' The Goths for the most part wandered southwards, and brought with them the greatest susceptibility for every thing valuable that existed there. Urged on from behind they sought for settlements. They were glad to trade, and showed themselves amicably disposed. Only when they met with treachery did they put forth their strength in war. Their Christianity, like that of their first teacher and bishop, was sectarian in its character, but they treated the orthodoxy of Italy with the greatest respect. And in many respects they proved themselves greater friends of peace, and better protectors of civilization, than the emperors of Rome. With regard to the susceptibility, which Germanic tribes brought with them from the North and East, the deepest rooted, and most important feature is the earnest longing for an actual redemption, regeneration, and resurrection, which characterised their religion, far beyond that of any other untutored race. Their mythology sets forth a conflict between good and evil, containing far more of the elements of moral truth than are to be found in the Persian religion. Baldur among the Æsir is Justice and Piety, and he is overcome by the stratagems of the wicked one. Through the intervention of the mediating principle he returns to life by a resurrection, and at the same time a complete renovation of the world occurs. This is heathenism no doubt, but of a select description. May not the eagerness with which the Germans grasped at the sacraments, of redemption from sin and death, which they met with in Rome, have proceeded from this religious predisposition in the wild olive-tree?

If we inquire further, how the north and south, the east and west of Europe became acquainted with each, and entered into reciprocal relations, and how Europe acquired an eastern boundary, we shall no doubt be referred to wars and conquests, to the voyages and colonies of the Normans, and to the great commercial league which united the cities, but all of these movements coincided with the spread of Christianity. The discovery of the east and north but especially of the latter, kept pace with the progress of Christian missions, and proceeded from one bishop's post to another. The greatest extent ever reached by the new Roman empire, under the Frank and Saxon emperors, corresponded very nearly to the limits of the spread of Christianity. Otho I. only Germanized the Sclavonic tribes as far as they were Christianized.