less prosperous career, has he not, like all the rest, felt that icy hand, which sooner or later dishonors the greatest events, and hurls the most stable dynasties from their throne? Is he not visibly struck by that slowly advancing thunderbolt which spares nothing? Such is the question which now claims our attention. In a word, I am about to lay before you the balance-sheet of Jesus Christ, and I invite you to examine it.

2. Why is time the great enemy? Because, gentlemen, it is endowed with a double power, the power of destroying and of building up. What was it that overthrew those primitive empires of Assyria and Chaldea? It was time. What overthrew that empire of Cyrus, vainly raised up again by Alexander? It was time. What overthrew that empire, increased by the ruins of all the others, and which we should rather call the world than an empire, the Roman world? It was time. What overthrew all those republics of the middle ages whose vestiges, surviving in marbles and paintings, we so much admire? It was time. And, on another hand, what has built up those new kingdoms whose sons we are, the kingdoms of the Franks, the Germans, the Anglo-Saxons, and the rest? It is the same hand, skilful in creating after having destroyed, and which, from the very dust where it has revelled with so much pride, draws forth substance, order, and solidity. Time destroys with one hand and rebuilds with the other, enemy alike to bo'h, since the edifice it raises up does but sink deeper the edifice it overthrows, for, with time, to found is also to destroy.

3. Nevertheless, gentlemen, let us not halt at those

splendid images, which only reveal to us the inimica. power of time by outward appearances. Let us endeavor to unveil its secret by analysis, in order that, having learned whence time derives its double power of destruction and edification, we may consider whether Jesus Christ has not been subject to the exercise of that formidable action, and why he alone has been able to escape from it, should we at length prove that he has escaped from it.

4. The action of time results from five causes, the first of which is novelty. Time is always young, and yet it ages all things. Each of its steps is the advance of dawn, but it leaves darkness and night behind. Restless child of eternity, it borrows unfading youth there, but has no power to communicate it, save but for a moment, to the things measured by its course. It passes, it sheds life; but that life of to-day soon becomes that of yesterday, of the day before, of bygone times, a remembrance, a relic of the past, and yet time is not impoverished; it is ever fertile and young, causing the new to follow the old. Now, the new possesses a charm which seduces the mind as well as the senses, and which enables doctrines bearing its impress easily to prevail against doctrines become superannuated by the simple fact of their duration. Remark what happens around us. As soon as a man is able to give a new form to ideas, and appropriate them to the course of time, he ir evitably has disciples. Why? Because he has said something which had not been said before, or had been forgotten. We have the passion for novelty in ideas as in all the rest, and it is not difficult to understand why

it is so. Predestinated as we are to enjoy the infinite, the infinite is our want, and we pursue it everywhere. Now, novelty is the only thing here below which gives us some sensation of the infinite. As soon as we have considered an object, we say: It is enough. Who will turn the page? Novelty turns it, and in turning it, disguises its feebleness to our intelligence by a false gleam of progress, which enchants us.

*

Above all others, gentlemen, Jesus Christ had to fear this inclination of our souls, which arms time with a power so dangerous to doctrinal sterility. However merciful the Gospel may be, it was not to bend to the inconstancy of our mind; "Heaven and earth shall pess away," said Jesus Christ, "but my words shall not pass away." It was to traverse all ages, losing daily the force of its novelty without losing any of its precept, or rather, like God, who, said Saint Augustin, is beauty ever ancient and ever new, the evangelic word was to infuse into its progressive antiquity a youthfulness which should charm the heart of all new genera tions.

TIME VANQUISHED BY JESUS CHRIST.-Ibid.

This first advantage obtained over time, a second remained to be gained. The second power of time is in experience, that is to say, in the revelation that results from the application of doctrines to the positive life of mankind. Every doctrine is a body of laws, which is of value only in so much as it is considered to

*St. Matt. xxiv. 35.

contain true relations of beings; it is like the creation of a world. As long as that creation remains in the mind in the state of pure conception, we may be deceived as to its real merits, because it is difficult to judge a great assemblage of ideas; but it is no longer so when, entering into the domain of reality, they are required to found or to maintain a positive order; experience infallibly manifests their weakness or their falsity; for a false or powerless law is incapable of establishing durable relations, and as a house based upon false mathematical principles falls to the ground, so no order whatever could subsist based upon ideas wanting the equilibrium of truth.

2. Now, who had ever more reason to fear this terriole test of experience than Jesus Christ? For, with the Gospel, he had not placed in the world a society confined within the narrow limits of a race and a country, but a universal society, wherein every soul, wheresoever born, could claim the rights of citizenship; and consequently, if the Gospel were false, its ruin should have been as great as the universe, and as rapid as time, acting at once upon numberless places and minds.

3. The third power of time is in corruption. Everything, having reached a certain point of prosperity, decays, because as soon as man is master he wills to enjoy, and because the inevitable result of enjoyment is that decomposition of the soul and body which we call corruption. The history of all successes is the history of Hannibal at Capua. Men grow listless and forget. ful, they think themselves secure, they become intox icated with success; the slow poison of ease relaxes all

the springs of their activity; and the being who is nothing save by activity, falls little by little into the shame of slumbering effeminacy. Nimrod begins, Sar danapalus ends. It is the high road of great fortunes; labor and virtue form them, enjoyments annihilate even their last traces. Religion, even more than any other empire, is subject to this great law, and above all the Church, or the religion of Jesus Christ, was firmly chained to it. For the blood of the cross had given her life; having sprung from the crucifixion of a God, she could not fail, in the days of her prosperity, to remember the cruel humiliations of her cradle. And, on another hand, the temptations which her triumph pre pared for her were far to surpass any temptations until then known. She was to see the kings of the earth at her feet, to issue orders from one end of the world to the other, to behold ages bending before her teaching and her action, to cover the earth with sumptuous monuments, and see it become a tributary to all the wants of unlimited power and glory; and under the weight of such success, reaching even to heaven, to preserve upon her brow, as in her heart, the sign of penance and humility. Or, if in one of the long days of her life she was about to yield, and to feel the attack of corruption, from that very corruption she was to resuscitate her life, not another life-as we see in nature-but her own life; and, like the eagle of Scripture, recovering the charm of her youth, soar aloft with outstretched wings, invigorated and renewed by her very poverty and by the shedding of her own blood.