ing his own perfection, could begin by fixing his affections on a perfect ideal, he would be borne into law through love. The message of Judaism was the power of the internal-the proclamation that all strength came from within. But Judaism herself never got far enough in to have much power. It did not reach the centre-the heart. Christianity found the mine for which Judaism was seeking. It touched the most subterranean spring in human nature, and unsealed the deepest well from which the waters of the life can flow-the impulse of the affections. It made the yoke of morality easy and its burden light. It enabled men to leap at a bound over paths which hitherto had taxed their utmost energy. It outran the commandments contained in ordinances; it went beyond the letter; it did more than was expected of it; it left Moses in the rear. The law of Christ goes further than the law of Sinai, and secures more success in its observance. forbids to hurt; but Calvary commands to heal. Sinai forbids to impose a yoke; Calvary commands to bear a burden. Sinai forbids to pass the beggar on the highway; Calvary commands to seek as well as save. The law of Moses has received in Christ more than it lost in Judaism; it has found in Him its "times for the restitution of all things.'

Sinai

And, in proportion as the moral law increases in the power of its observance, will a place be found in the Christian Pantheon for the ideas of Greece and

Rome. We defined the position of Greece to be the reverence for the present as distinguished from either the past or the future. Such a state of things cannot exist now; but religion is at one with science in hoping for a time when it shall exist. Christianity and modern science profess to differ in many things, but they are agreed in the anticipation of a golden age for man, an age in which the present order of things shall be perfected and glorified. To this time of completed evolution the message of Greece may look forward for its fulfilment. Alike from the scientific and from the Christian stand-point, we may contemplate the coming of a day when the earth itself shall be worthy of reverence, when the passing hour shall be worth preserving, and the present shall be valued for itself alone. What does Paul mean when he says, "The creation itself shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the sons of God"? Is it not simply a prediction that the time is coming in which the aspirations of Greece shall be fulfilled, when poetry shall speak the language of prose, and beauty shall become itself a teacher of truth? The Roman too has his place in this vision of the glorious liberty of the sons of God. I have shown, in a previous chapter, how the Roman ideal of a son of God was itself but a premature and abortive effort to realise. a Christian conception. It was the search for a kingdom which should embrace under its sway all

Y

other kingdoms, which, without destroying diversities of nature, should keep the unity of law. We have seen how the ideal of Rome was above her power. Her power was only physical, and therefore it could not rule without crushing. But, as I have already pointed out, Christianity offers to the old Roman religion a realisation of its dream. It tells of a dominion which she extends from sea to sea without destroying the sea-without obliterating the boundaries that now divide, or annihilating the diversities that now distinguish. It shows us this kingdom already existing in miniature, already growing in strength, already prophetic of its future fulness; and, by the very presentation of the vision, it connects the modern with the ancient world, and joins the culture of the later age with the civilisation of an age that has passed away.

Nor has the message of the Teuton been omitted in this accumulation of thought which has gathered round the religion of the Cross. It will be remembered that we defined this message to be the association of development with the idea of divinity. I indicated that the novelty lay in the association. Progress was not a new idea as applied to the affairs of men. But in the mythology of the Teuton the scene of the progressive drama is laid not in earth but heaven, and the growth through the successive stages is a growth among the gods. Here is a thought sufficiently bold to challenge our attention, and speci

ally striking among a people whose earliest reverence was for the idea of complete and instantaneous power. To say that the Divine Life can itself partake in the changes of the universe, to admit that the Absolute Spirit can be affected by the transmutations of existence, is a less natural thought than in modern times it seems. Brahmanism appears to hold it; but it is only in appearance. The universe of the Brahmin is an illusion; there is no real movement either of the human or of the divine, and nothing reigns but everlasting stillness. But with the Teuton it is all the reverse: the world is a reality; the external world is a special reality. The acts of the gods are no parts of a sleeping consciousness; the changes in the life of the gods are no interludes of a dream. The drama in heaven is a real drama; the progress is a genuine progress. The growth of the Divine Life is distinctively the message of the Teuton.

But, unique as it is among the religions of the world, it is vindicated in that faith which professes to find a place for all. In Christianity, as in the mythology of the Teuton, we meet the same otherwise anomalous doctrine that the Divine Life can grow. Here the kingdom of heaven is compared not to something which is fashioned and finished from the beginning, but to a seed which is cast into the ground, which is at first the least of all seeds, which is long hid from the view of the beholder, which lies for days and nights unnoticed, and which, at last,

springs up, he cannot tell how. Paul declares in the boldest language that there is a "law of the Spirit of Life." He means that the Spirit of Life has made. itself subject to the progress of humanity, has flowed with man's growth and ebbed with man's arrested development. He tells us that the Christian life— the life of the Eternal-is itself a process of incarnation, by which the stages of humanity are conquered one by one, a process by which the infant becomes a child, the child a youth, and the youth a full-grown man. We see the life born amid trouble, hid in obscurity, reared in subjection, tried by temptation, matured by suffering, ripened by crucifixion, and only reaching its perfect beauty at the end of the days. We see first the blade, then the ear, afterward the full corn in the ear. Yet we are taught to think of the process as divine from the very beginning-divine in its germ, divine in its struggle, divine in its consummation. The message of the Teuton has been redelivered by the Spirit of Christ; it has received its justification from the religion of humanity.

I have thus endeavoured to show that the appearance of Christianity has been accompanied by a resurrection from the dead. It is popularly said to have conquered the faiths of the past. And so it has; but in a very peculiar way. It has conquered as the Roman empire wished to conquer-not by submergence, but by incorporation. It would not be true to say that it has destroyed them; it would