been easily sent even by the Roman captains, who were in Palestine, and one of whom we know, as an eye-witness, gave such a memorable testimony in favour of the Son of God, who had died upon the cross; for, according to the general tradition of the church, this man afterwards became a Christian. There is, again, in the character of Tiberius, nothing at all at variance with this account; for, however dark, and mistrustful, and cruel, and corrupt might be the character of that emperor, we cannot deny he was possessed of a powerful and profound understanding. He was by no means unsusceptible of religious impressions, nor indifferent on matters of religion; but he followed therein his own peculiar views and opinions; and hence it is quite natural that his attention should be easily drawn to any extraordinary religious event. He detested, and even persecuted, the Egyptian idolatry and the Jewish worship, and ordered that the sacerdotal robes and sacred vessels of their priests should be burned. He had a strong faith in destiny, was somewhat addicted to astrology, and dreaded signs in the heavens. If his hostility towards the Jews, and his persecution of that nation, be alleged as an objection to the truth of this narrative (as if it were absolutely necessary that he should have confounded the Christians with the Jews), we may reply that this is a purely arbitrary hypothesis, and that it is far more natural to conclude, that when Tiberius had received from Pilate, or other Roman captains, certain intelligence of the life and death of our Saviour, he was, no doubt, informed by these eye-witnesses of the hatred and persecution which our Saviour had sustained from the Jews. The single fact, indeed, that Christianity was so much opposed to the pagan worship and the political idolatry of the Romans-as, for instance, to the sacrifice before the image of the emperor-was in all probability not stated nor clearly explained in this first account, composed by persons very little acquainted with the true nature of the new revelation. Otherwise such an account would have produced on a man imbued with Roman prejudices, no other impression but that of aversion and disgust. The idea and proposal itself, of regarding an extraordinary man, endowed with wonderful and divine power, as God, and as worthy of divine honours, has nothing at all improbable in itself, or at all inconsistent with Roman rites and usages, or with Roman opinions respecting gods and deified men. The only thing really improbable in the whole affair is, that the senate at that time should have dared to oppose and contradict Tiberius in this matter. However, if the senate, as we may easily imagine, were hostile to the proposal of Tiberius, it was easy for them to adopt some evasive form, and indirectly to impede and set aside this matter, which, as it regarded old national rites, fell entirely within their jurisdiction. But this circumstance, as we said before, is the only thing which appears at all exaggerated in this account. It is easy to understand from this how the proposition of Tiberius, which was never carried into execution, should have fallen into complete oblivion, and should never have come to the knowledge of Tacitus; as we may conclude, from his account of the Christians, that he would not otherwise have suffered this circumstance to pass unnoticed. Singular and remarkable as this fact may be, it is of no importance in itself; it forms only a single incident in the strange and contradictory impressions which the new religion produced on the minds of the Romans. A passage of Suetonius, in his history of Claudius, would show that the Christians were confounded with the Jews; for, speaking of that emperor, he says, "he expelled the Jews from the capital, for, at the instigation of Chrestus, they were ever exciting troubles in the state.' Chrestus, in the Greek pronunciation, has the same sound as Christus; and we may easily conceive, that what the Christians said of their invisible Lord and Master, that he interdicted them such and such rites, may, in a matter so totally strange and unintelligible to the Romans, have been easily misunderstood, as applying to a chief and party leader actually in existence. In the same way, by the troubles spoken of in the passage above-cited, may be understood the accustomed and just refusal of the Christians to comply with the illicit demands of the pagans. pagan A fuller light is thrown on this subject by the narrative of Tacitus in his history of Nero; and, however much the Christian religion may be misrepresented by the Roman historian, his account has still a character thoroughly historical, and amidst its very misrepresentations, is perfectly intelligible, if we take care to distinguish the chief historical traits. When Nero, at the height of his crimes and presumption, had set Rome on fire in order to have a lively and dramatic spectacle of the burning Troy, he afterwards strove to screen himself from the odium of this misdeed, and to throw the blame entirely upon the Chris tians, who must have been then tolerably numerous in Rome. Tacitus thinks they were not the authors of the conflagration laid to their charge; and his feelings revolt at the inhuman cruelties which Nero inflicted upon them; but, he adds, many horrible things were said of them, and that it was known in particular they were animated by sentiments of hatred towards the whole human race. That we are to understand by this hatred towards the human race nothing more than that rigid rejection by the Christians of all the idolatrous rites, maxims, and doctrines of the heathen world, is perfectly evident of itself. Among the horrible things of which the Christians were accused, we are in all probability to understand the repasts of Thyestes, for their enemies make use of that very term in their accusations;-accusations which were received with eager credulity by a populace that held them in abhorrence. Although this charge was no doubt afterwards the effect of malicious calumny and deliberate falsehood, yet it is very possible that a gross misconception may originally have given rise to it, and that this accusation, egregiously false as it was, proceeded from an obscure and confused knowledge of the mystery of the holy sacrifice, and of the reception of the sacrament in that divine feast of love solemnised in the Christian assemblies. Even in the official report, which the better and well-meaning younger Pliny transmitted to Trajan in the year 120, while he was governor of Pontus and Bithynia, we can clearly discern the embarrassment of the generous Roman, who was at a loss how to consider the new religion, so perfectly mysterious and totally inexplicable did it appear to him; and who in consequence was quite undetermined what he was to do, and how he was to treat the matter. He writes that, according to the confessions wrung from the Christians by torture, after the Roman custom, they were found to entertain an excessive, strange, heterogeneous, and very perverse, faith or superstition; but that in other respects they were people of irreproachable morals, and who, on a certain day of the week, Sunday, assembled in the morning to sing the praises of their God, Christ, and to engage themselves to the fulfilment of the most important precepts of virtue, and that they met again in the evening to enjoy a simple and blameless repast. He adds that their numbers had already increased to such an extent that the altars of paganism were nearly abandoned; and that a great number of He is at a women, boys, and children belonged to their sect. loss to know, with respect to the latter, whether he should make any difference in the degree of punishment which, it appears, they have inevitably incurred under the old Romans laws against all societies and fraternities not sanctioned by the state; and on this subject he demands further instructions from the emperor, in this memorable official letter, which is still extant, and contains the most ancient portrait of the Christians drawn by a Roman hand. Thus then, in this period of the world, in this decisive crisis between ancient and modern times, in this great central point of history, stood two powers opposed to each other.-On one hand, we behold Tiberius, Caligula, and Nero, the earthly gods, and absolute masters of the world, in all the pomp and splendour of ancient paganism-standing, as it were, on the very summit and verge of the old world, now tottering to its ruin :—and, on the other hand, we trace the obscure rise of an almost imperceptible point of light, from which the whole modern world was to spring, and whose further progress and full development, through all succeeding ages, constitutes the true purport of. modern history. LECTURE X. On the Christian Point of View in the Philosophy of History.-The Origin of Christianity, considered in reference to the Political World. -Decline of the Roman Empire. A REGULAR history of the life of our Saviour, recounted like any other historical occurrence, would, in my opinion, be out of place in a philosophy of history. The subject is either too vast for profane history, or in its first beginnings too obscure, whether we consider its internal importance, or in a mere historical point of view, its outward appearance. A thinking, and in his way well-thinking Roman, when he had obtained a more accurate knowledge of the life of our Saviour from the accounts of the Roman procurator, or other Roman dignitaries in Palestine, might have expressed himself respecting the whole transaction in the following terms: "This is a very extraordinary man, endued with wonderful and divine power (for such vague and general admiration might well be indulged in by a heathen, who yet adhered to the fundamental doctrines of his ancestral faith), a man who, he would continue to say, has produced a great moral revolution in minds, and was, according to the most credible testimony, of the purest character and most rigid morals, who taught much that was sublime on the immortality of the soul and the secrets of futurity; but who was accused by his enemies, and delivered over to death by his own people." Šuch, perhaps, would have been the judgment of a Tacitus, had he drawn his information from better and less polluted sources. So long, however, as all these transactions were confined to the small province of Judea, the soundest and best constituted Roman mind could have scarcely felt a more than passing regret at the perpetration of so signal an act of private injustice, and would, in other respects, have not regarded it as an event which could, in a Roman point of view, be termed historical, or worthy to occupy a place in the more extended circle of his own world. It was only when Christianity had become a power in the |