have never succeeded in being. Add to these considerations the way in which the Hebrews in their foreign residences were intentional or unintentional missionaries always of the revealed truth. In the position, not of modern prisoners of war, but like emigrant families or townships, their observance of their religious customs became a light to innumerable neighbourhoods, which, in their chief and last captivity, the labours of the new order of the scribes made gradually a most definite guiding-light. That the result was a wide, though no doubt, by proportion, meagrely fruitful, sowing of the living seed in the outfield of the nations, is indicated by the account of the gathering in Jerusalem on the day of Pentecost, of which Peter's first audience was a part. Those strangers from every known country must have been chiefly proselytes, and proselytes who, like the queen of Ethiopia's treasurer, could afford to travel immense distances sometimes to worship the Lord at Jerusalem. The "wise men from the East," not proselytes, indicated a wider class impressed by the prophecies of the Jewish faith at the time of our Lord's advent. learning ism and tianity. 12. An age of learning, wielding the instrument of a uni- Age of versal language, overlapped the meeting of Jewish and Chris- overlaptian times giving facilities, both before and after, unique in ping Judathe world's history, for the rapid diffusion and appreciation Chrisof thought. Under the decaying political consequence of the small Greek communities, philosophy, which gave the Greeks an acknowledged supremacy in intellectual empire, was intensely cultivated; and the powerful dominion of Rome, which absorbed those divided commonwealths of Greece, protected the freedom of thought with a toleration never excelled. The way thus opened and kept open for the universal diffusion of revealed truth was only opportunely ready for being occupied. The Hebrew Scriptures were now in the Greek tongue, the universal language of the learned. They were issued from the centre of written learning in that age, Alexandria, and their dissemination was accompanied and made utmost use of by a dissemination of the Hebrews themselves, long begun to that citizenship of the world towards which the fall of Jerusalem only gave them their last impetus. The He Secular civilisa brew race was, before that last dispersion, settled over the whole known world in an extent and manner which provided singularly for the freedom of the impulse which that dispersion of the Jews was to give to the discussion of Christian truth universally; a discussion which, being inimical on their part as often as favourable, made sure of compelling Gentile attention to the offered faith. Dean Stanley, compiling from various sources, shows the dissemination of the Hebrew people, in the time from the Babylonian captivity to the Christian era, to have been one of the most remarkable facts of history. Only four of the twenty-four courses of priests returned to Palestine with Ezra. Babylon remained the great home of the race. Three universities of Jewish study existed in Mesopotamia. Westward they formed a considerable proportion of the population of almost every province. Alexandria was the great publishing centre of their Scriptures. Numerous settlements of them pervaded Asia Minor. In the Greek islands their force was such that in Cyprus, during an insurrection, they massacred 420,000 of the Greek inhabitants. A little before the birth of Christ a large portion of the city of Rome was assigned to them. They had a native force associated with them everywhere of converts from heathenism, proselytes of righteousness or of the gate. In the decaying vigour of paganism and of the Roman empire, then becoming weak through over-extension and growth of luxury, the power of that one people, capable of so wide combination, and invigorated by their faith with strength of purpose, was an object of dread to their Roman rulers. No part of the population of the empire could so command attention, and compliance with their demands. Their synagogues were the only vigorous representatives of religion in the empire, and they were universal. Paul found them in every Greek city in Greece and Asia Minor except Athens. 13. In reviewing the education of the world to revealed tions not a thoughts of God, and of man's relation to Him, discussion has continuous naturally been omitted of any parallel education of the human of the race by transmitted civilisations, or the production of subjec education world. tive capabilities and propensities of thought through the mixture of races. These two elements undoubtedly enter into national civilisations, as the peculiarities of modern peoples exemplify, but they do not determine what is to be; for elements causing distinction as certainly arise as those producing similarity. Among nations, as among families, of which nations are the aggregates, the intellectual faculties, the different selections of taste, and perhaps the constitutional attraction to different departments of morals, are evidently distributed as much as educating influences are distributed. Race manifestly comes into action in determining the matters of thought in which a people will take delight, or excel, or comparatively fail. Writers on the subject of race even attempt to analyse the British character genealogically. A historical comparison, however, of the civilisations of the successive dominant races of the world does not show any systematic connection making them one whole. Progress has to be traced chiefly or nearly altogether in the fluctuating accumulation of objective knowledge, while the subjective characters of the races exhibit more of difference than of derivation. The oldest empire exhibits, as its civilising element, a simple but earthly idea of God ruling all things—a divinity always in one stage visible. Their Pharaohs were in their eyes only the youngest god reigning on earth until his bodily death, and then receiving worship at the hands of the next still earthly god. All things in Egypt were regulated in connection with anticipated universal immortality. The civilisation of the family of Chaldee dominions, partly contemporary with the Egyptian, and succeeded by the Persian empire, was essentially human and material. The Assyrians had no thought of themselves as being in any way partakers in the divinity of their gods. They were the subjects of the gods, and themselves essentially human, of the earth, earthly. Unspeculative, they had physical knowledge of the observed kind, but apparently did not make much progress except in possessing what they knew minutely. Their pictures are characterised by detail, like the pictures of the Dutch school. The manly education of the Persian-to shoot the bow, to ride, and to speak the truth-had a higher theosophy, also, than the heavy Assyrian had constructed. However preserved or derived, that people had thoughts of the unity and the government of Ormuzd, their divinity, which perhaps made the theology of the Hebrews, whom they found dispersed in Babylonia on their conquest of it, more quickly appreciable by them, so as to produce those high thoughts of Jehovah which are expressed in the decrees of Cyrus and his successors, preserved in the Old Testament. The Persian records now discovered show, it is said, uniformly that superior theology. As to the source of their knowledge of it, we have to bear in mind that those records are all of kings after the conquest of Babylon, written, therefore, after the time when Hebrew theology had access to the lively Persian mind directly, and may have been long reaching it before, through Assyrian intercourse; Babylonia having for long been growing into a second Palestine. The next civilisation was a fourth distinct type, speculative in a unique degree, æsthetic in all materialistic studies and appetites, and superficial as to conscience. The Greek stands out from all historic races as the one which made the most enjoyment out of all mental and bodily capabilities, and carried itself freest from all moral cares that could restrain their highly cultivated and economised self-indulgence. The Roman mind, æsthetically much inferior to the Greek, borrowing philosophy also as well as taste from Greece, had as its characteristic a moral greatness unknown to Greek history, as Greek speculation was to Persian or Assyrian. The science of order came naturally to that last great people, from whom the Western world has derived the great principles of law and government, and the benignity of authority extending its calm, tolerant, firm, fostering hand over all diversities of national life. 14. Those old-world ruling powers were thus more contrasted with one another than connected together. Connected parisons by the link of succession or influence, their civilisations were not essentially derived from one another, but much more bear education. the character of separate facts in the history of mankind; unless we are to contemplate them in a historical connection which we can recognise in them. We can very clearly see in them a historical succession of compelled comparisons made of the world's different kinds of civilising theories with the power Historical succession of com pelled com with re vealed for all man's moral needs which was claimed for the Hebrews' revealed religion in the prophet's proclamation: "All flesh is grass, and the glory of man is the flower of the grass. The grass withereth, and the flower thereof fadeth, and the grace of the fashion of it perisheth; but the word of the Lord endureth for ever" (Isa. xl. 6-8). Egypt's theology was put to shame by the messenger of Jehovah, the God of Egypt's slaves. In that momentous contest in which the Egyptians were made to "know" the I AM, Egypt's man-god was the most stupendous approach to human almightiness which the world has ever known, the scornful Rameses, the Sesostris of whose universal conquering presence primeval history is so full. In later times Solomon's heaven-taught wisdom was compared with and excelled "the wisdom of all the children of the east country, and all the wisdom of Egypt." The materialistic grandeur of Assyria was consciously rebuked over and over again by the unseen power of Israel's God; and the end of the long instruction-partly spoken as by Jonah, partly felt as by Sennacherib-was the great Nebuchadnezzar's experience, embodied in formal proclamations to his empire of the supremacy of the Hebrew's Jehovah. Daniel's captivity saw that recognition followed by, if not developed into, the so Hebrew-like theology of the Persian rulers which we read now in the Scriptural extracts from Persian archives, and in the language of Persian records and inscriptions now available (Rawlinson's Bampton Lecture, 1859). The bare narrative of the Book of Acts contains nothing of boastful or exulting reference to the triumph of the Christian truth; but no reader accustomed in historical reading to see the force of particular facts, can help seeing beneath the simple detail of Paul's doings in Athens, Ephesus, and Corinth-the three centres of Greek philosophy, religion, and cultivation of bodily felicity-an impressive picture of the far-famed Greek "wisdom" confessing itself a failure before the rudely-set truth spoken by the apostle. The epoch of Greek philosophy contained a fact peculiar in the history of man's moral condition, an effort arising in all |