the three first centuries as a special evidence of the wisdom and goodness of God.

So likewise a very grave modification of an "evidence" heretofore current must ensue in another respect, in consequence of an increased knowledge of other facts connected with the foregoing. It has been customary to argue, that, à priori, a supernatural revelation was to be expected at the time when Jesus Christ was manifested upon the earth, by reason of the exhaustion of all natural or unassisted human efforts for the amelioration of mankind. The state of the world, it has been customary to say, had become so utterly corrupt and hopeless under the Roman sway, that a necessity and special occasion was presented for an express divine intervention. Our recently enlarged ethnographical information shows such an argument to be altogether inapplicable to the case. If we could be judges of the necessity for a special divine intervention, the stronger necessity existed in the East. There immense populations, like the Chinese, had never developed the idea of a personal God, or had degenerated from a once pure theological creed, as in India, from the religion of the Vedas. Oppressions and tyrannies, caste-distinctions, common and enormous vices, a polluted idolatrous worship, as bad as the worst which disgraced Rome, Greece, or Syria, had prevailed for ages.

It would not be very tasteful, as an exception to this description, to call Buddhism the gospel of India, preached to it five or six centuries before the gospel of Jesus was proclaimed in the nearer East; but, on the whole, it would be more like the realities of things, as we can now behold them, to say that the Christian revelation was given to the Western world because it

deserved it better and was more prepared for it than the East. Philosophers, at least, had anticipated in speculation some of its dearest hopes, and had prepared the way for its self-denying ethics.

There are many other sources of the modern questionings of traditional Christianity, which cannot now be touched upon, originating, like those which have been mentioned, in a change of circumstances wherein observers are placed; whereby their thoughts are turned in new directions, and they are rendered dissatisfied with old modes of speaking. But such a difficulty as that respecting the souls of Heathendom, which must now come closely home to multitudes among us, will disappear, if it be candidly acknowledged that the words of the New Testament, which speak of the preaching of the gospel to the whole world, were limited to the understanding of the times when they were spoken; that doctrines concerning salvation, to be met with in it, are, for the most part, applicable only to those to whom the preaching of Christ should come; and that we must draw our conclusions respecting a just dealing hereafter with the individuals who make up the sum of Heathenism, rather from reflections suggested by our own moral instincts than from the express declarations of Scripture writers, who had no such knowledge as is given to ourselves of the amplitude of the world which is the scene of the divine manifestations.

Moreover, to our great comfort, there have been preserved to us words of the Lord Jesus himself, declaring that the conditions of men in another world will be determined by their moral characters in this, and not by their hereditary or traditional creeds; and both many words and the practice of the great Apostle

Paul, within the range which was given him, tend to the same result. He has been thought even to make an allusion to the Buddhist Dharmma, or law, when he said, "When the Gentiles, which have not the law, do by nature the things contained in the law, these having not the law, are a law unto themselves, which show the work of the law written in their hearts," &c. (Rom. ii. 14, 15). However this may be, it is evident, that, if such a solution as the above is accepted, a variety of doctrinal statements hitherto usual Calvinistic and Lutheran theories on the one hand, and sacramental and hierarchical ones on the other must be thrown into the background, if not abandoned.

There may be a long future during which the present course of the world shall last. Instead of its drawing near the close of its existence, as represented in Millenarian or Rabbinical fables, and with so many more souls, according to some interpretations of the gospel of salvation, lost to Satan in every age and in every nation than haye been won to Christ, that the victory would evidently be on the side of the Fiend, we may yet be only at the commencement of the career of the great Spiritual Conqueror even in this world. Nor have we any right to say that the effects of what He does upon earth shall not extend and propagate themselves in worlds to come. But, under any expectation of the duration of the present secular constitution, it is of the deepest interest to us, both as observers and as agents, placed evidently at an epoch when humanity finds itself under new conditions, to form some definite conception to ourselves of the way in which Christianity is henceforward to act upon the world which is our own.

Different estimates are made of the beneficial effects already wrought by Christianity upon the secular aspect of the world, according to the different points of view from which it is regarded. Some endeavor, from an impartial standing-point, to embrace in one panorama the whole religious history of mankind, of which Christianity then becomes the most important phase; others can only look at such a history from within some narrow chamber of doctrinal and ecclesiastical prepossessions. And anticipations equally different for like reasons will be entertained by persons differently imbued, as to the form under which, and the machinery by which, it shall hereafter be presented with success, either to the practically unchristianized populations of countries like our own, or to peoples of other countries never as yet even nominally Christianized.

Although the consequences of what the gospel does will be carried on into other worlds, its work is to be done here. Although some of its work here must be unseen, yet not all; nor much even of its unseen work, without at least some visible manifestation and effects. The invisible Church is to us a mere abstraction. Now, it is acknowledged on all hands, that to the Multitudinist principle are due the great external victories which the Christian name has hitherto won. On the other hand, it is alleged by the advocates of Individualism, that these outward acquisitions and numerical accessions have always been made at the expense of the purity of the Church, and also that Scriptural authority and the earliest practice is in favor of Individualism. Moreover, almost all the corruptions of Christianity are attributed by Individualists to the effecting by the Emperor Constantine of an unholy

alliance between Church and State. Yet a fair review, as far as there are data for it, of the state of Christianity before the time of that emperor, will leave us in at least very great doubt whether the Christian character was really, in the anterior period, superior on the average to what it has subsequently been. We may appeal to the most ancient records extant, and even to the Apostolic Epistles themselves, to show that neither in doctrine nor in morals did the primitive Christian communities at all approach to the ideal which has been formed of them. The moral defects of the earliest converts are the subject of the gravest expostulation on the part of the apostolic writers; and the doctrinal features of the early Church are much more undetermined than would be thought by those who read them only through the ecclesiastical creeds.

Those who belong to very different theological schools acknowledge at times that they cannot with any certainty find in the highest ecclesiastical antiquity the dogmas which they consider most important. It is customary with Lutherans to represent their doctrine of justification by subjective faith as having died out shortly after the apostolic age. In fact, it never was the doctrine of any considerable portion of the Church till the time of the Reformation. It is not met with in the immediately post-apostolic writings, nor in the apostolic writings, except those of St. Paul; not even in the Epistle to the Hebrews, which is of the Pauline or Paulo-Johannean school. The faith at least of that epistle, "the substance of things hoped for," is a very different faith from the faith of the Epistle to the Romans, if the Lutherans are correct in representing that to be a conscious apprehending of