given up to the body's senses, how lofty a place among creatures human nature holds, in that He appeared to men as a true man, and not merely in a visible form, which He might have shaped of air and tempered to our senses. For the nature which was to be freed was likewise to be assumed. And that neither sex might fancy itself to be despised by its Creator, while He took a woman for His mother, He assumed the Man.

"For nothing did He by force, but all by persuasion and exhortation. In fact the old servitude was passed, the time of freedom had dawned, and it was seasonable and salutary for man to be persuaded with how free a will he had been created. By His miracles He obtained from man faith towards His divine Person; by His Passion, towards His human nature. Speaking to the multitude as God, when His Mother was announced to Him He admitted her not; and yet, as the Gospel says, He went down and was subject to His parents. For when teaching He appeared as God; in the times of His life as man. When about to turn water into wine as God He says, 'Woman, what have I to do with thee? mine hour is not yet come.' But when the hour had come for Him to die as man, from the cross He recognised His Mother, and intrusted her to the disciple whom He loved above all others. To their own destruction the nations were thirsting after riches as the ministers of pleasure; it was His will to be poor. They flung them

selves upon honour and power; He refused to be a king. They thought children after the flesh a great good; He despised such wedlock and such offspring. In their utter pride they abhorred disgrace; He endured every kind of it. They considered injuries not to be borne; what greater injury than for the just and innocent to be condemned? They execrated bodily pain; He was scourged and tormented. They feared to die; He suffered death. They thought the cross the most ignominious kind of death; He was crucified. Every thing through the desire of having which we lived amiss, He did without, and rendered worthless. Every thing through avoiding which we shrunk from the truth, He endured, and made level to us. For it is impossible to commit any sin save by seeking for what He despised, or flying from what He endured. And therefore we have a perfect system of moral discipline in His whole life on earth through the Man whom He deigned to

assume.'

* De vera Religione, 30, 31.

LECTURE IV.

EFFECT OF THE CHRISTIAN PEOPLE ON THE WORLD.

CICERO is a fair representative of human nature at the time he lived, of man such as heathenism had made him. We may sum up in him the thoughts, the principles, the motives of many generations. When the man who had sacrificed Cicero to Mark Antony surprised one of his grandchildren reading the works of his victim, he said: "My child, that was a great man." If Cicero looked to human renown as his reward; if his hope began and ended with his dignity as a citizen and senator of Rome; if he was unduly beaten down by adversity; if his private inner life was devoid of morality; and if the wide circle of his accomplishments excluded expressly the knowledge of a personal all-seeing God, the rewarder and punisher of and of a responsible soul in himself, these were not peculiarities in him, but the very air of the atmosphere which he breathed. If one had searched through the Senate the knights and the commonalty of Rome in his day, the same results would have appeared in all. Amid the almost infinite varieties of individual character, these general lineaments would have been seen in each. Cicero's genius was his

men,

own, and raised him above most of his contemporaries; but these moral features were common to him with them all.

And in like manner the great genius of St. Augustine marks him out among all generations of men. His intellectual greatness was his own, and reached by few of any age: but the moral features of his life from the time of his conversion, the conquest which he achieved over the three master desires of man, the love of pleasure, of honour, and of wealth, with all "the curiosity of the eyes," these were common in him, not with all men, indeed, of his day, but with a certain number. And this number during four hundred years had been perpetually increasing. And those who, like him, presented these moral features were to be found in both sexes, in the very rich, in the middle class, and in the poor, in every tribe and people within the vast limits of the Roman dominion, and far beyond it, in the learned and the unlearned, in the free and the slave. No condition of human life was without them, and none was wholly composed of them. I have only taken St. Augustine as a specimen of a vast revolution which had occurred in the bosom of this effete Roman civilisation. It was a revolution unlike any thing which had occurred before in the history of the human race. It was absolutely without a precedent. Just at the time that Tacitus, from the safe security of Trajan's reign, was uttering his sarcasms

against Roman society, and expressing his hopelessness as to the world's course, and the destiny of the human race; just as he was preferring the simplicity of the Germans in the depths of their woods to the gaudy but polluted brilliance of the world's capital, because "no one there smiled at vice, nor was it called fashion to corrupt and be corrupted;' just at this time an author, whose very name is unknown, drew the following picture of a class of men who had lately sprung up.

"Christians are neither in country nor in language nor in customs distinguished from other men. For they nowhere inhabit cities which are entirely their own, nor do they use a language different from others, nor pursue a life marked by peculiarity. Nor was this discipline of life discovered by them through any invention or thought of curious men, nor do they represent any humanlytaught dogma, as some do. Rather they inhabit both Greek and foreign cities, as the lot of each may be cast and while they follow the habits of the country as to dress, food, and the rest, they exhibit a wonderful and confessedly strange citizenship among themselves. They dwell severally in their own country, but it is as sojourners. They take a share in every thing as citizens, yet endure every thing as strangers. Every strange land is a country to them, and every country a strange land. They marry like all others; they have children, but

*Tacitus, Germania, 19.