They have broken up into a hundred forms; they will break up into a thousand more till the whole fabric has crumbled into dust. They have none of the strong hold on human nature which the old religions had, because they are not the embodiment of a sacred mystery but rather the explaining away of all mystery. They are a perpetual drifting detritus without coherence as without consistency; and as they slip down the slant of time they fall into the abyss of oblivion, and will leave not a trace behind, only in so far that, vanishing from sight, they make way for the fuller establishment of the truth-the eternal, the Divine spherical truth, absolute in its cohesion. and perfect in all its parts.

The hold which heathen and pagan creeds have had upon mankind conveys a lesson to ourselves which superficial thinkers are apt to overlook. It is certain they could not have held whole nations beneath their influence had not each in its turn been an embodiment of some essential truth, which though alloyed in its expression by error remains in itself essentially a part of truth. They snatched at fragments of the natural law which governs the universe, or they embodied in present expression the inalienable hopes of mankind. They took the world of nature as the utterance neither of a pass

ing nor of an inexorable law, but of an inscrutable Being, and believed that the mystical underlies the natural. Untaught by the sweet revelations of Christianity their religion could assume no aspect but one of terror, silent dread, and deep horror. Their only escape from this result was in the deterioration that necessarily follows the popularisation of all abstract ideas unless protected by a system at once consistent and elastic, like that which is exhibited in the discipline of the Catholic Church. They wearied of the rarefied atmosphere of unexplained mystery. They wanted the tangible and evident in its place. Like the Israelites they lusted after the flesh-pots of Egypt; and their lower nature and evil passions rebelled against the moral loftiness of abstract truth. The multitude could not be kept up to the mark, and needed coarser food. The result was inevitable. But as all religion involves mystery, instead of working upward through the natural law to the spiritual and Divine law they inverted the process, and grovelled down below the natural law with its sacramentalistic character, to the preternatural and diabolic. Mystery was retained, but only in the profanation of themselves and of natural laws, until they had passed outside all nature, and, making a hideous travesty of humanity had

become more vile and hateful than the devils they served.

Thus the Romans vulgarised the Greek mythology; and that which had remained during a long period as a beautiful though purely human expression of a Divine mystery among a people whose religion consisted mainly in the worship of the beautiful, and who themselves transcended all that humanity has ever since beheld in their own personal perfection of beauty, became when it passed through the coarser hands of the Romans, a degenerate vulgarity, which infected their whole existence in art and in manners quite as effectually as in religion. Then Rome flung open her gates to all the creeds of all the world, and the time-honoured embodiments of fragmentary but intrinsic truth met together, and were all equally tolerated while all equally degenerated. All!except the one whole and perfect truth: the Gospel of Salvation. That was never tolerated. That alone could not be endured, because the instinct of evil foresaw its own impending ruin in the Gospel of peace.

It was a new thing for mankind to be told that a part of the essence of religion was elevated morality and the destruction of sin in the individual. Whatever comparative purity of life had

co-existed with the old religions was hardly due to their influence among the multitude, though it might be so with those whose educated superiority enabled them to reason out the morality of creeds. While the rare philosopher was reading the inmost secret of the abstract idea on which the religion of his country was based, and the common pagan was practising the most degraded sorcery and peering into obscene mysteries without a single elevation of thought, suddenly the life of the GodMan was put before the world and the whole face of creation was gradually changed.

But as the shadows of the past in the old religions led up to the light, so shall the light of the present lead up to the "perfect day."

CHAPTER III.

THE CHARACTERISTICS OF GOD'S GOVERNMENT

ABUNDANCE.

WE have adverted to the indirect government of the creation by God-to the government which He condescends to administer first through the primary laws which He has stamped upon the universe; and secondly, through the moral and physical activity with which He has endowed mankind.

We are making vast and rapid strides in this day towards discovering and unravelling these primary laws. At the present moment we seem to have got ourselves somewhat into a tangle of knowledge, which threatens to asphyxiate us with the overpowering perfume of its lavish blossoms like that of the exuberant growth of the tropical flora.

We are caught as in the meshes of a net, and hardly allowed time to solve one problem and satisfy ourselves with a conclusion before some