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: viz. both as to the possibility of Christianity coexisting 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 belief1 of three centuries back) no sooner received any poisonous fluid than immediately it shivered into crystal splinters. They thought to honour 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 1 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 reagency might have been devised in the quality of the glass. At least, there is no prima facie absurdity in such a supposi tion. 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 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 vigour,—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 colouring 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 colourable 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 coexistence of a Pagan oracle, how came it that the Author of Christianity had thus brooked (nay, by many signs of cooperation, 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 this seemed the more remarkable in the case of their war with Antiochus, because that (if any that history has recorded) was a holy war. But, after one tragical experience, which cost the lives of a thousand martyrs, the Maccabees quite as much on a level with their scrupulous brethren in piety as they were superior in good sensebegan to reflect that they had no shadow of a warrant from Scripture for counting upon any miraculous aid; that the whole expectation, from first to last, had been human and presumptuous; and that the obligation of fighting valiantly against idolatrous compliances was, at all events, paramount to the obligation of the Sabbath. In one hour, after unyoking themselves from this monstrous millstone of their own forging about their own necks, the cause rose buoyantly aloft as upon wings of victory; and, as their very earliest reward -as the first fruits from thus disabusing their minds of windy presumptions-they found the very case itself melting away which had furnished the scruple; since their cowardly enemies, now finding that they would fight on all days alike, had no longer any motive for attacking them on the Sabbath; besides that their own astonishing victories henceforward secured to them often the choice of the day not less than of the ground. But, without lingering on these outworks of the true religion, namely, 1st, the Temple of Jerusalem; 2dly, the Sabbath,—both of which the divine wisdom often saw fit to lay prostrate before the presumption of idolatrous assaults, on principles utterly irreconcilable with the Oracle doctrine of the Fathers, there is a still more flagrant argument against the Fathers, which it is perfectly confounding to find both them and their confuter overlooking. It is this:— Oracles, take them at the very worst, were no otherwise hostile to Christianity than as a branch, or (mathematically speaking) a function of Paganism. If, for instance, the Delphic establishment were hateful (as sometimes no doubt it was) to the holy spirit of truth which burned in an apostle, why was it hateful? Not primarily in its special character of Oracle, but in its universal character of Pagan temple; not as an authentic distributor of counsels adapted to the infinite situations of its clients-often very wise counsels; but as being ultimately engrafted on the stem of idolatrous religion-as deriving, in the last resort, their sanctions from Pagan deities, and, therefore, as sharing constructively in all the pollutions of that tainted source. Now, therefore, if Christianity, according to the fancy of the Fathers, could not tolerate the co-presence of so much evil as resided in the Oracle superstition—that is, in the derivative, in the secondary, in the not unfrequently neutralised or even redundantly compensated, mode of error-then, a fortiori, Christianity could not have tolerated for an hour the parent superstition, the larger evil, the fontal error, which diseased the very organ of vision-which not merely distorted a few objects on the road, but spread darkness over the road itself. Yet what is the fact? So far from any mysterious repulsion externally between idolatrous errors and Christianity, as though the two schemes of belief could no more co-exist in the same society than two queen-bees in a hive—as though elementary nature herself recoiled from the abominable concursus-do but open a child's epitome of History, and you find it to have required four entire centuries before the destroyer's hammer and crowbar began to ring loudly against the temples of idolatrous worship; and not before five, nay, locally, six or even seven, centuries, had elapsed, could the better angel of mankind have sung gratulations announcing that the great strife was over—that man was inoculated with the truth, or have adopted the impressive language of a Latin Father, that "the "owls were to be heard in every village hooting from the "dismantled fanes of heathenism, or the gaunt wolf disturb"ing the sleep of peasants as he yelled in winter from the แ cold, dilapidated altars." Even this victorious consummation was true only for the southern world of civilisation. The forests of Germany, though pierced already to the south in the third and fourth centuries by the torch of missionaries -though already at that time illuminated by the immortal Gothic version of the New Testament proceeding from Ulphilas, and still surviving-sheltered through ages in the north and east vast tribes of idolaters, some awaiting the baptism of Charlemagne in the eighth century and the ninth, others actually resuming a fierce countenance of heathenism for the martial zeal of crusading knights in the thirteenth and fourteenth. The history of Constantine has grossly misled the world. It was very early in the fourth century (313 A.D.) that Constantine found himself strong enough to take his earliest steps for raising Christianity to a privileged station; which station was not merely an effect and monument of its progress, but a further cause of progress. In this latter light, as a power advancing and moving, but politically still militant, Christianity required exactly one other century to carry out and accomplish even its eastern triumph. Dating from the era of the very inaugurating and merely local acts of Constantine, we shall be sufficiently accurate in saying that the corresponding period in the fifth century (namely, from about 404 to 420 A.D.) first witnessed those uproars of ruin in Egypt and Alexandria-fire racing along the old carious timbers, battering-rams thundering against the ancient walls of the horrid temples-which rang so searchingly in |