as rare accidents from rare privileges, or from rare coincidences of unanimity in the leaders of the place, than on the other hand they were certain not to arise in that unconditional universality pretended by the fathers. Wheresoever Paganism was interwoven with the whole moral being of a people, as it was in Egypt, or with the political tenure and hopes of a people, as it was in Rome, there a long struggle was inevitable before the revolution could be effected. Briefly, as against the fathers, we find a sufficient refutation in what followed Christianity. If, at a period five, or even six hundred years after the birth of Christ, you find people still consulting the local Oracles of Egypt, in places sheltered from the pointblank range of the state artillery, — there is an end, once and forever, to the delusive superstition that, merely by its silent presence in the world, Christian ity must instantaneously come into fierce activity as a reägency of destruction to all forms of idolatrous error. That argument is multiplied beyond all power of calculation; and to have missed it is the most eminent instance of wilful blindness which the records of human folly can furnish. But there is another refutation lying in an opposite direction, which presses the fathers even more urgently in the rear than this presses them in front; any author posterior to Christianity, who should point to the decay of Oracles, they would claim on their own side. But what would they have said to Cicero, - by what resource of despair would they have parried his authority, when insisting (as many times he does insist), forty and even fifty years before the birth of Christ, on the languishing condition of the Delphic Oracle ?

What evasion could they imagine here? How could that languor be due to Christianity, which far antici pated the very birth of Christianity? For, as to Cicero, who did not "far anticipate the birth of Christianity," we allege him rather because his work De Divinatione is so readily accessible, and because his testimony on any subject is so full of weight, than because other and much older authorities cannot be produced to the same effect. The Oracles of Greece had lost their vigor and their palmy pride full two centuries before the Christian era. Historical records show this à posteriori, whatever were the cause; and the cause, which we will state hereafter, shows it à priori, apart from the records.

Surely, therefore, Van Dale needed not to have pressed his victory over the helpless fathers so unrelentingly, and after the first ten pages by cases and proofs that are quite needless and ex abundanti ; simply the survival of any one distinguished Oracle upwards of four centuries after Christ— that is sufficient. But if with this fact we combine the other fact, that all the principal Oracles had already begun to languish, more than two centuries before Christianity, there can be no opening for a whisper of dissent upon any real question between Van Dale and his opponents; namely, both as to the possibility of Christianity coëxisting with such forms of error, and the possibility that oracles should be overthrown by merely Pagan, or internal changes. The less plausible, however, that we find this error of the fathers, the more curiosity we naturally feel about the source of that error; and the more so, because Van Dale never turns his eyes in that direction.

This source lay (to speak the simple truth) in abject superstition. The fathers conceived of the enmity between Christianity and Paganism, as though it resembled that between certain chemical poisons and the Venetian wine-glass, which (according to the belief of three centuries back) no sooner received any poisonous fluid, than immediately it shivered into crystal splinters. They thought to honor Christianity, by imaging it as some exotic animal of more powerful breed, such as we English have witnessed in a domestic case, coming into instant collision with the native race, and exterminating it everywhere upon the first conflict. In this conceit they substituted a foul fiction of their own, fashioned on the very model of Pagan fictions, for the unvarying analogy of the divine procedure. Christianity, as the last and consummate of revelations, had the high destination of working out its victory through what was greatest in a man through his reason, his will, his affections. But, to satisfy the fathers, it must operate like a drug-like sympathetic powders like an amulet - or like a conjurer's charm. Precisely the monkish effect of a Bible when hurled at an evil spirit—not the true rational effect of that profound oracle read, studied, and laid to heart was that which the fathers ascribed to the mere

* Which belief we can see no reason for rejecting so summarily as is usually done in modern times. It would be absurd, indeed, to suppose a kind of glass qualified to expose all poisons indifferently, considering the vast range of their chemical differences. But, surely, as against that one poison then familiarly used for domestic murders, a chemical reägency might have been devised in the quality of the glass. At least, there is no prima facie absurdity in such a supposition.

proclamation of Christianity, when first piercing the atmosphere circumjacent to any oracle; and, in fact, to their gross appreciations, Christian truth was like the scavenger bird in Eastern climates, or the stork in Holland, which signalizes its presence by devouring all the native brood of vermin, or nuisances, as fast as they reproduce themselves under local distemperatures of climate or soil.

It is interesting to pursue the same ignoble superstition, which, in fact, under Romish hands, soon crept like a parasitical plant over Christianity itself, until it had nearly strangled its natural vigor, back into times far preceding that of the fathers. Spite of all that could be wrought by Heaven, for the purpose of continually confounding the local vestiges of popular reverence which might have gathered round stocks and stones, so obstinate is the hankering after this mode of superstition in man that his heart returns to it with an elastic recoil as often as the openings are restored. Agreeably to this infatuation, the temple of the true God even its awful adytum the holy of holies or the places where the ark of the covenant had rested in its migrations- all were conceived to have an eternal and a self-vindicating sanctity. So thought man: but God himself, though to man's folly pledged to the vindication of his own sanctities, thought far otherwise; as we know by numerous profanations of all holy places in Judea, triumphantly carried through, and avenged by no plausible judgments. To speak only of the latter temple, three men are memorable as having polluted its holiest recesses: Antiochus Epiphanes, Pompey about a century later, and Titus pretty nearly by the

same exact interval later than Pompey.

Upon which of these three did any judgment descend? Attempts have been made to impress that coloring of the sequel in two of these cases, indeed, but without effect upon any man's mind. Possibly in the case of Antiochus, who seems to have moved under a burning hatred, not so much of the insurgent Jews as of the true faith which prompted their resistance, there is some colorable argument for viewing him in his miserable death as a monument of divine wrath. But the two others had no such malignant spirit; they were tolerant, and even merciful; were authorized instruments for executing the purposes of Providence; and no calamity in the life of either can be reasonably traced to his dealings with Palestine. Yet, if Christianity could not brook for an instant the mere coëxistence of a Pagan oracle, how came it that the Author of Christianity had thus brooked (nay, by many signs of coöperation, had promoted) that ultimate desecration, which planted "the abomination of desolation as a victorious crest of Paganism upon his own solitary altar? The institution of the Sabbath, again — what part of the Mosaic economy could it more plausibly have been expected that God should vindicate by some memorable interference, since of all the Jewish institutions it was that one which only and which frequently became the occasion of wholesale butchery to the pious (however erring) Jews? The scruple of the Jews to fight, or even to resist an assassin, on the Sabbath, was not the less pious in its motive because erroneous in principle; yet no miracle interfered to save them From the consequences of their infatuation. And