cavils of the sceptic about the narrowness and exclusiveness of the faith of Israel: it was narrow for the wisest of reasons; it was exclusive for the most benignant of objects. And when at length the middle wall of partition fell, which had during so many ages divided mankind; and Jew and Greek, so long severed by antipathies the most inveterate, and by habits the most diverse, met to do homage to a common Master, and to worship one only Lord, it then became apparent what an unspeakable treasure it was which that repellent race who peopled Palestine had conserved for the world. For a time, the new faith went on its way rejoicing; without let or hindrance it sped upon its magnanimous and godlike mission, mingling not with the things of earth. Conscious that the world by wisdom knew not God, the early teachers of Christianity, from the elevation which they had reached, looked down with indifference upon all the philosophy and all the science of heathendom, and eyed with jealousy every attempt to commingle Christianity with the conception of even the loftiest sages of antiquity. Such was the temper of the majority of the first heralds of the gospel; and notwithstanding the censure with which it has been visited by some recent writers who aspire to being considered men of enlarged and liberal thought, we must be permitted to consider that temper a salutary one. It served better than any other course of action could have served, tc

point out the fact that the new religion was in a high and peculiar sense not of this world,-that amongst all the multifarious forms of worship which had found a shelter and a home beneath the eagles of old Rome, it dwelt apart, and was not to be reckoned as one of them. Humanly speaking, had Christianity in the morning of its existence got entangled in the meshes of a vain philosophy, its power, and consequently its progress, would have been immeasurably crippled. Its capacity to turn the world upside down would have departed from it, and the cross would soon have ceased to be an ensign to the peoples.

There is much that we now know of the scheme of human redemption of which its early teachers probably knew but little. Religion was with them more a thing of the soul, than a thing of system. Their vivid intuitions of divine truth had not yet passed through the alembic of the logical consciousness; many of its heights were left unscaled, and many of its depths unsounded; but the image of the grand leading features of Christianity had been daguerreotyped upon the souls of all of them with an intensity and a faithfulness of which a martyr age can alone furnish us with an adequate conception. Pity it was that that day of glorious action should so soon have been succeeded by a night of gloomy speculation. Within the bosom of the church herself, there speedily arose those who imagined

they could lend additional weight and value to the unsearchable riches of Christ, by incorporating with them the treasures of a world's wisdom-that thus the gospel might in this new dress, and clad in this motley robe, gather around it those to whom its unadorned simplicity was repulsive. Full soon, however, did this alliance prove more baneful than beneficial. It speedily became apparent to even the most casual observer, that not a little wood, hay, and stubble, had been mingled with the gold, silver, and precious stones. Christianity gained nothing when it began to flow through the arteries of Grecian philosophy, and the Attic bird, thrilling her thickwarbled notes, marred the melody of the Messianic message. We know it was, in the then circumstances of the world, in the nature of things impossible that Christianity could altogether escape from this comparative contamination. Its heralds announced a message that touched all the deepest problems which philosophy had attempted in vain to solve. The themes Plato had discussed were decided by Paul; the scattered members of truth's lovely form were collected in Christ; and the flickering starlight of philosophy, which men in their darkness had so deified, sank before the majestic sun of eternal truth. All this was no doubt fact, but all this was in the last degree humiliating to men who had so long been gazing upon mere fragments of the truth that they had come at length to regard the disjecta membra as more beauti

ful than the perfect image. Thus arose that opposition which the gospel was fated to encounter, and thus originated that contamination which it was destined to undergo. The reaction of philosophy against Christianity culminated in Julian the Roman emperor, who renouncing the gospel, embraced with all the ardour of a neophyte the outward creed of paganism. Julian did all that a man, and that man an emperer, could do, to restore the ancient mythology to its former place of power; with a zeal worthy of a better cause he laboured to reinvest the gods of Greece with the glory which had departed from amongst them. He was, we believe, a mind peculiarly susceptible to the seductive influence of the old worship; and we can account for his abandonment of Christianity without branding him as an apostate, in the ordinary or odious sense at least in which that word is employed. He had seen little amongst his relations to recommend the new religion. The rulers of Rome who had embraced the gospel were far-very far, from being living epistles of Christ; and that dash of chivalry which was in Julian's nature, combined with his ardent admiration of external beauty, gave the weight of his name and power to the falling faith. It seemed to him a robbing earth of its glory to restrict our conception of God, as revelation does, to an invisible being. He aspired to restore those halcyon days of the world when Grecian mythology, all glorious

within, and radiant with the light of the land of the sun, swayed an unchallenged sceptre over the souls of men.

The paganism of Julian was pantheistic in its tendencies, as was indeed all the philosophical idolatry of his age. This fact renders an attentive study of the epoch imperative upon every one who would comprehend aright the present phases of unbelief. However important the question of the evidences and the proof from miracles may be, it is not on these grounds alone. that the battle between faith and infidelity must now be fought. It is useless to talk of evidences or of miracles to men who assert that belief in a personal God is "theosophic moonshine," or who look upon the claim for Messiahship set up for Christ as only affording a premium to a crooked and a perverted logic. These men must be encountered with other weapons than those which vanquished the Voltairian school. We must seek in an earlier age than the age of the encyclopædists for the type of their scepticism; we must go back to a time when the young church was contending with the philosophy of the old world, for the rudimen tary principles of the unbelief of these latest assailants of our faith. We do not say-we are very far from saying that either the treatment of the evidences, or the proof from miracles, should even for a moment be lost sight of. Such forgetfulness would be perilous in