personal and more brutal. It became dangerous to be too conspicuously victorious. There yet remains a letter, amongst the few surviving from that unlettered period, which whispers a thrilling caution to a great officer not to be too meritorious : "Dignus eras triumpho," says the letter, si antiqua tempora extarent." But what of that? What signified merit that was to cost a man his head? And the letter goes on to add this gloomy warning-" Memor cujusdam ominis, cautius velim vincas." 1 The warning was thrown away; the man (Regillianus) persisted in these imprudent victories; he was too meritorious; he grew dangerous; and he perished. Such examples forced upon the officers a less suspicious and a more brutal ambition. The laurels of a conqueror marked a man out for a possible competitor, no matter through whose ambition—his own in assuming the purple, or that of others in throwing it by force around him. The differences of guilt could not be allowed for where they made no difference in the result. But the laurels of a butcher created no jealousy, whilst they sufficed for establishing a camp reputation. And thus the danger of a higher ambition threw a weight of encouragement into the lower and more brutal.

So powerful, indeed, was this tendency-so headlong this gravitation to the brutal-that, unless a new force, moving in an opposite direction, had begun to rise in the political heavens, the Roman Empire would have become an organized engine of barbarism, barbarous and making barbarous. This fact gives one additional motive to the study of Christian Antiquities, which on so many other motives interest and perplex our curiosity. About the time of Diocletian the weight of Christianity was making itself felt in high places. There is a memorable scene between that Emperor and a Pagan priest representing an Oracle (that is, speaking on behalf of the Pagan interests) full forty years before the legal establishment of Christianity, which shows how insensibly the Christian faith had crept onwards within the fifty or sixty years previous. Such hints, such "momenta," such stages in the subtle progress of Christianity, should be

1 "You were worthy of a triumph, if the ancient times were still here."-"Mindful of a certain omen, I would have you conquer more cautiously."--M.

carefully noted, searched, probed, improved. And it is partly because too little anxiety of research has been applied in this direction that every student of ecclesiastical history mourns over the dire sterility of its primitive fields. For

the first three or four centuries we know next to nothing of the course by which Christianity moved, and the events through which its agency was developed. That it prospered, we know; but how it prospered (meaning not through what transcendent cause, but by what circumstantial steps and gradations) is painfully mysterious. And, for much of this darkness, we must confess that it is now past all human power of illumination. Nay, perhaps it belongs to the very sanctity of the struggle in which powers more than human were working concurrently with man that it should be lost (like much of our earliest antediluvian history) in a mysterious gloom, and for the same reason-viz. that, when man stands too near the super-sensual world, and is too palpably coagent with schemes of Providence, there would arise, upon the total review of the whole plan and execution, were it all circumstantially laid below our eyes, too compulsory an evidence of a supernatural agency. It is not meant that men should be forced into believing: free agencies must be left to the human belief both in adapting and rejecting, else it would cease to be a moral thing or to possess a moral value. Those who were contemporary to these great agencies saw only in part; the fractionary mode of their perceptions intercepted this compulsion from them. But, as to us who look back upon the whole, it would perhaps have been impossible to secure the same immunity from compulsion, the same integrity of the free, unbiassed choice, unless by darkening the miraculous agencies, obliterating many facts, and disturbing their relations. In such a way the equality is maintained between generation and generation; no age is unduly favoured, none penuriously depressed. Each has its separate advantages, each its peculiar difficulties. The worst has not so little light as to have a plea for infidelity. The best has not so much as to overpower the freedom of election

a freedom which is indispensable to all moral value, whether in doing or in suffering, in believing or denying.

Meantime, though this obscurity of Primitive Christianity

is past denying, and possibly, for the reason just given, not without an a priori purpose and meaning, we nevertheless maintain that something may yet be done to relieve it. We need not fear to press into the farthest recesses of Christian Antiquity, under any notion that we are prying into forbidden secrets, or carrying a torch into shades consecrated to mystery. For, wherever it is not meant that we should raise the veil, there we shall carry our torch in vain. Precisely as our researches are fortunate, they authenticate themselves as privileged; and in such a chase all success justifies itself.

No scholar-not even the wariest-has ever read with adequate care those records which we still possess of Primitive Christianity. He should approach this subject with a vexatious scrutiny. He should lie in ambush for discoveries, as we did in reading Josephus.1

Let us examine his chapter on the Essenes, and open the very logic of the case, its very outermost outline, in these two sentences: A thing there is in Josephus, which ought not to be there; this thing we will call Epsilon (E). A thing there is which ought to be in Josephus, but which is not; this thing we propose to call Chi (X).

The Epsilon, which ought not to be there, but is—what is that? It is the pretended philosophical sect amongst the Jews to which Josephus gives the name of Essenes: this ought not to be in Josephus, nor anywhere else, for certain we are that no such sect ever existed.

The Chi, which ought by every obligation-obligations of reason, passion, interest-to have been more broadly and emphatically present in the Judæan history of the Josephan period than in any other period whatever, but unaccountably is omitted-what is that? It is, reader, neither more nor less than the new-born brotherhood of Christians. The whole monstrosity of this omission will not be apparent to the

1 Flavius Josephus, the Jewish Historian, b. A.D. 37, d. about A.D. 100. His account of the Essenes is contained in portions of his History of the Jewish War and his Jewish Antiquities,—both of which books were written by him in Greek during his residence in Rome after he had left Judæa.-M.

reader until his attention be pointed closely to the chronological position of Josephus,-his longitude as respects the great meridian of the Christian era.

The period of Josephus's connexion with Palestine, running abreast (as it were) with that very generation succeeding to Christ-with that very Epichristian age, prolonging the generation of Christ, which dated from the Crucifixion, and terminated in the Destruction of Jerusalem-how? by what possibility? did he escape all knowledge of the Christians as a body of men that should naturally have challenged notice from the very stocks and stones of their birthplace; the very echo of whose footsteps ought to have sunk upon the ear with the awe that belongs to spiritual phenomena, that belongs to the bells of convents in the Desert long since dilapidated and surviving only in the traditions of Bedouins, that belongs (in the sublime expression of Wordsworth) to "echoes from beyond the grave." There were circumstances of distinction in the very closeness of the confederation that connected the early Christians which ought to have made them interesting. But, waiving all that, what a supernatural awe must naturally have attended the persons of those who laid the corner-stone of their faith in an event so affecting and so appalling as the Resurrection! The Chi, therefore, that should be in Josephus, but that is not, how can we suggest any approximation to a solution of this mystery?

True it is that an interpolated passage, found in all the printed editions of Josephus, makes him take a special and a respectful notice of Jesus Christ. But this passage has long been given up us a forgery by all men not lunatic.

True it is that Whiston makes the astounding discovery that Josephus was himself an Ebionite Christian. Josephus a Christian! In the instance before us, were it possible that he had been a Christian, in that case the wonder is many times greater that he should have omitted all notice of the whole body as a fraternity acting together with a harmony unprecedented amongst their distracted countrymen of that age, and, secondly, as a fraternity to whom was assigned a certain political aspect by their enemies. The civil and external relations of this new party he could not but have noticed, had he even omitted the religious doctrines which

bound them together internally, as doctrines too remote from Roman comprehension.1 In reality, so far from being a Christian, we can show that Josephus was not even a Jew in any conscientious or religious sense. He had never taken the first step in the direction of Christianity, but was, as many other Jews were in that age, essentially a pagan; as little impressed with the true nature of the God whom his country worshipped, with his ineffable purity and holiness, as any idolatrous Athenian whatsoever.

The wonder therefore subsists, and revolves upon us with the more violence after Whiston's efforts to extinguish it, how it could have happened that a writer who passed his infancy, youth, manhood, in the midst of a growing sect so transcendently interesting to every philosophic mind, and pre-eminently so interesting to a Jew, should have left behind him,-in a compass of eight hundred and fifty-four pages, double columns (each column having sixty-five lines or a double ordinary octavo page), much of it relating to his own times,—not one paragraph, line, or fragment of a line, by which it can be known that he ever heard of such a body as the Christians?

And to our mind, for reasons which we shall presently show, it is equally wonderful that he should talk of the Essenes, under the idea of a known, stationary, original sect amongst the Jews, as that he should not talk of the Christians, equally wonderful that he should remember the imaginary as that he should forget the real. There is not one difficulty, but two difficulties; and what we need is not one solution, but two solutions.

If, in an ancient palace, reopened after it had been shut up for centuries, you were to find a hundred golden shafts or pillars for which nobody could suggest a place or a use, and if, in some other quarter of the palace, far remote, you were afterwards to find a hundred golden sockets fixed in the floor-first of all, pillars which nobody could apply to any purpose, or refer to any place; secondly, sockets which nobody could fill-probably even "wicked Will Whiston "

1 "Roman comprehension":-The reader must remember that the audience addressed by Josephus was not a Jewish but a Roman audience.