here the word cessant points to a distinction of cases which already in itself is fatal to their doctrine. By cessant Juvenal means evidently what we, in these days, should mean in saying of a ship in action that her fire was slackening. This powerful poet, therefore, wiser so far than the Christian Fathers, distinguishes two separate cases: first, the state of torpor and languishing which might be (and in fact was) the predicament of many famous Oracles through centuries not fewer than five, six, or even eight; secondly, the state of absolute dismantling and utter extinction which, even before his time, had confounded individual Oracles of the inferior class, not from changes affecting religion, whether true or false, but from political revolutions. Here, therefore, lies the first blunder of the Fathers, that they confound with total death the long drooping which befell many great Oracles from languor in the popular sympathies under changes hereafter to be noticed; and, consequently, from revenues and machinery continually decaying. That the Delphic Oracle itself—of all oracles the most illustrious-had not expired, but simply slumbered for centuries, the Fathers might have convinced themselves by innumerable passages in authors contemporary with themselves; and that it was continually throwing out fitful gleams of its ancient power when any very great man (suppose a Cæsar) thought fit to stimulate its latent vitality is notorious from such cases as that of Hadrian. He, in his earlier days, whilst yet only dreaming of the purple, had not found the Oracle superannuated or palsied. On the contrary, he found it but too clear-sighted; and it was no contempt in him, but too ghastly a fear and jealousy, which laboured to seal up the grander ministrations of the Oracle for the future. What the Pythia had foreshown to himself she might foreshow to others; and, when tempted by the same princely bribes, she might authorize and kindle the same aspiring views in other great officers. Thus, in the new condition of the Roman power, there was a perpetual peril lest an oracle, so potent as that of Delphi, should absolutely create rebellions by first suggesting hopes to men in high commands. Even as it was, all treasonable assumptions of the purple, for many generations, commenced in the hopes. inspired by auguries, prophecies, or sortileges. And, had

the great Delphic Oracle, consecrated to men's feelings by hoary superstition and privileged by secrecy, come forward to countersign such hopes, many more would have been the wrecks of ambition, and even bloodier would have been the blood-polluted line of the imperial successions. Prudence, therefore, it was, and state policy, not the power of Christianity, which gave the final shock (of the original shock we shall speak elsewhere) to the grander functions of the Delphic Oracle. But, in the meantime, the humbler and more domestic offices of this oracle, though naturally making no noise at a distance, seem long to have survived its state relations. And, apart from the sort of galvanism notoriously applied by Hadrian, surely the Fathers could not have seen Plutarch's account of its condition already a century later than our Saviour's nativity. The Pythian priestess, as we gather from him, had by that time become a less select and dignified personage; she was no longer a princess in the land —a change which was proximately due to the impoverished income of the temple; but she was still in existence, still held in respect, still trained, though at inferior cost, to her difficult and showy ministrations. And the whole establishment of the Delphic god, if necessarily contracted from that scale which had been suitable when great kings and commonwealths were constant suitors within the gates of Delphi, still clung (like the Venice of modern centuries) to her old ancestral honours, and kept up that decent household of ministers which corresponded to the altered ministrations of her temple. In fact, the evidences on behalf of Delphi, as a princely house that had indeed partaken in the decaying fortunes of Greece, but naturally was all the prouder from the irritating contrast of her great remembrances, are so plentifully dispersed through books that the Fathers must have been willingly duped. That in some way they were duped is too notorious from the facts, and might be suspected even from their own occasional language. Take, as one instance amongst the whole harmony of similar expressions, this short passage from Eusebius : οἱ Ἕλληνες ὁμολογουντες ἐκλελοιπεναι αὐτων τα χρηστηρια : the Greeks admitting that their Oracles have failed-(there is, however, a disingenuous vagueness in the very word εκλελοιπεναι)—ουδ' άλλοτε

TOTE Èέ alwvos—and when? why, at no other crisis through the total range of their existence ή κατα τους χρόνους της εὐαγγελικης διδασκαλιας—than precisely at the epoch of the evangelical dispensation, etc. Eusebius was a man of too extensive reading to be entirely satisfied with the Christian representations upon this point. And in such indeterminate phrases as κατα τους χρονους (which might mean indifferently the entire three centuries then accomplished from the first promulgation of Christianity, or specifically that narrow punctual limit of the earliest promulgation) it is easy to trace an ambidextrous artifice of compromise between what would satisfy his own brethren, on the one hand, and what, on the other hand, he could hope to defend against the assaults of learned Pagans.

In particular instances it is but candid to acknowledge that the Fathers may have been misled by the remarkable tendencies to error amongst the ancients from their want of public journals, combined with territorial grandeur of empire. The greatest possible defect of harmony arises naturally in this way amongst ancient authors locally remote from each other, but more especially in the post-christian periods, when reporting any aspects of change, or any results from a revolution variable and advancing under the vast varieties of the Roman Empire. Having no newspapers to effect a level amongst the inequalities and anomalies of their public experience in regard to the Christian revolution, when collected from innumerable tribes so widely differing as to civilization, knowledge, superstition, &c., hence it happened that one writer could report with truth a change as having occurred within periods of ten to sixty years which for some other province would demand a circuit of six hundred. example, in Asia Minor, all the way from the sea-coast to the Euphrates, towns were scattered having a dense population of Jews. Sometimes these were the most malignant opponents of Christianity; that is, wherever they happened to rest in the letter of their peculiar religion. But, on the other hand, where there happened to be a majority (or, if not numerically a majority, yet influentially an overbalance) in that section of the Jews who were docile children of their own preparatory faith and discipline, no bigots, and looking anxiously for the

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fulfilment of their prophecies (an expectation at that time generally diffused),— under those circumstances the Jews were such ready converts as to account naturally for sudden local transitions which in other circumstances or places might not have been credible.

This single consideration may serve to explain the apparent contradictions, the irreconcilable discrepancies, between the statements of contemporary Christian bishops locally at a vast distance from each other, or (which is even more important) reporting from communities occupying different stages of civilization. There was no harmonizing organ of interpretation, in Christian or in Pagan newspapers, to bridge over the chasms that divided different provinces. A devout Jew, already possessed by the purest idea of the Supreme Being, stood on the very threshold of conversion : he might, by one hour's conversation with an apostle, be transfigured into an enlightened Christian; whereas a Pagan could seldom in one generation pass beyond the infirmity of his novitiate. His heart and affections, his will and the habits of his understanding, were too deeply diseased to be suddenly transmuted. And hence arises a phenomenon which has too languidly arrested the notice of historians : viz. that already, and for centuries before the time of Constantine, wherever the Jews had been thickly sown as colonists, the most potent body of Christian zeal stood ready to kindle under the first impulse of encouragement from the state; whilst in the great capitals of Rome and Alexandria, where the Jews were hated and neutralized politically by Pagan forces, not for a hundred years later than Constantine durst the whole power of the government lay hands on the Pagan machinery, except with timid precautions, and by graduations so remarkably adjusted to the circumstances that sometimes they wear the shape of compromises with idolatry. We must know the ground, the quality of the population, concerned in any particular report of the Fathers, before we can judge of its probabilities. Under local advantages, insulated cases of Oracles suddenly silenced, of temples and their idol-worship overthrown, as by a rupture of new-born zeal, were not less certain to arise 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, Christianity must instantaneously come into fierce activity as a reagency 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 anticipated 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 vigour and their palmy pride full two centuries before the Christian Era. Historical records show this a posteriori, whatever were the cause; and the cause, which we will state hereafter, shows it a priori, apart from the records.