Yes, Constantine it was, earliest of Christian princes, that first of all invested Pauperism with the majesty of an

* "Constantine that first:"-But let me warn the reader not to fancy that the public largesses of corn to the humbler citizens of Rome had intercepted the possibility of this precedency for Constantine by many generations before he was known, or even before Christianity was revealed. There was no vestige of charity in the Roman distributions of grain. These distributions moved upon the same impulse as the sportulæ of the great oligarchic houses, and the donatives of princely officers to their victorious soldiery upon great anniversaries, or upon accessions to the throne, or upon adoptions of successors, &c. All were political, oftentimes rolling through the narrowest grooves of intrigue; and so far from contemplating any collateral or secondary purpose of charity, that the most earnest inquiry on such occasions was-to find pretexts for excluding men from the benefit of the bounty. The primary thought was—who should not be admitted to participate in the dole. And at any rate none were admitted but citizens in the most rigorous and the narrowest sense. Constantine it was:--I do not certainly know that I have anywhere called the reader's attention to another great monument which connected the name of Constantine by a separate and hardly noticed tie with the propagation of Christianity. What name is it that, being still verdant and most interesting to all the nations of Christendom, serves as a daily memorial to refresh our reverence for the emperor Constantine? What but his immortal foundation of Constantinople, imposed upon the ruins of the elder city Byzantium, in the year of Christ 313, now therefore in the 1565th year of its age; which city of Constantinople is usually regarded, by those who have science comprehensive enough for valuing its various merits, as enjoying the most august site and circumstantial advantages, in reference to climate, commerce, navigation, sovereign policy, and centralisation, on this planet-with the doubtful reservation of one single South American station, viz., that of the Brazilian city Rio Janeiro (or, as we usually call it, Rio). Doubtless these magnificent natural endowments did much to influence the choice of Constantine; and yet I believe that no economic advantages, even though greater and more palpable, would have been sufficient to disengage his affections from a scene so consecrated by grand historical recollections as Rome, had not one overwhelming repulsion, ineradicably Roman, violently disenchanted him for ever. This turned upon religion. Rome, it was found, could not be depaganised. Too profound, too inveterately entangled with the very soil and deep substructions of Latium were the old traditional records, promises, auguries, and mysterious splendours of concentrated Heathenism in, and on, and nine times round about, and 50 fathoms below, and countless fathoms in upper air above this most memorable of capital cities.

organ amongst political forces, on the scriptural warrant that the poor should never cease out of the land-Constantine that conferred upon misery, as a mighty potentate dwelling for ever in the skirts of populous cities, the privilege of appearing by a representative and a spokesman in the council-chamber of the Empire.

Had, then, the Pagans of all generations before Con

Jupiter Capitolinus, the Sybil's Books, which for Roman minds were authentic, the dread cloister of Vestal Virgins, Jupiter Stator, and the undeniable omen of the Twelve Vultures*-centuries of mysterious sympathy between dim records and dim inquiries, could no more be washed away from the credulous heart of the Roman plebs, than the predictions of Nostradamus from the expecting and listening faith of Catherine de' Medici and her superstitious court. In short, fifty baptisms could not have washed away the deep-seated scrofula of Paganism in Rome. Constantine therefore wisely drew away a select section of the population to the quiet waters of the Propontis (the Sea of Marmora, which oblige me by pronouncing as if an imperfect rhyme to armoury, not as if the o in the penult. were accented). And thus, by a double service to Christianity-viz., by a solemn institution of charitable contributions to the poor, as their absolute right under the Christian law, and by a wise shepherd's segregation of diseased members from his flock-he earned meritoriously, and did not win by luck, that fortunate destiny which has locked up his name into that of the regenerated Rome--the earliest Christian city-and the mother of the Second, or the Oriental Roman Empire.

*"Omen of the twelve vultures:"-The reader must not allow himself to be repelled from the plain historic truth by foolish reproaches of superstition or credulity. The fact of twelve vultures having appeared under ceremonial circumstances, at what may be considered the inauguration of Rome, and was so understood at the time, is as certain as any fact the best attested in the history of Rome. And as it repeatedly announced itself during the lapse of these twelve centuries, when as yet they were far from being completed, there cannot be a reasonable doubt that a most impressive coincidence did occur between the early prophesy and its extraordinary fulfilment. In a gross general statement, such as can be made in a single sentence, we may describe the duration of Rome, from Romulus to Christ, as 750 years, which leaves about 450 to be accounted for, in order to make up the tale of the twelve vultures. And pretty exactly that number on 450, plus 2 or 3 suppose, measures the interval between Christ and Augustulus.

stantine, or more strictly before the Christian era, no charity, no pity, neither money nor verbal sympathy at the service of despairing poverty? No, none at all. Supposing, for instance, any Gentile establishments to have existed up and down Greece, or Egypt, or the Grecianised regions of Asia Minor and Syria, at the Apostolic era, these would undoubtedly have been referred to by the apostles as furnishing models to emulate, or to copy with improvements, or utterly and earnestly to ignore, under terror of contagion from some of those fundamental errors in their plan theoretically, or in their administration practically, which might be counted on as pretty certain to pollute the executive details, however decent in their first originating purpose. Upon any one of some half-dozen motives, St Paul, in his boundless activity of inquiry and comparison, would have found cause to mention such institutions. And again, in the next generation, under the Emperor Trajan, Pliny would have had abundant ground for dwelling on this early communism and system of reciprocal charity established amongst the Christians, had he not recoiled from thus emblazoning the beneficence of an obnoxious sect, when conscious that no parallel public bounty could be pleaded as a set-off on the side of those who desired to persecute this new-born sect. There remains, moreover, a damnatory evidence on this point, much more unequivocal and direct, in the formal systems of ethics still surviving from the Pagan world under the noonday splendour of its civilisation: Aristotle's, for example, at the epoch of Alexander the Great; and Cicero's, at a corresponding period of refinement three centuries later in Rome. Now, in these elaborate systems, which have come down to us unmutilated, no traces are to he found of any recognised duty moving in the direction of public aid and

relief to the sufferers from poverty. Our wicked friend Kikero, for instance, who was so bad, but wrote so well, who did such naughty things, but said such pretty things, has himself noticed in one of his letters, with petrifying coolness, that he knew of destitute old women in Rome, who went without tasting food for one, two, or even three days. After making such a statement, did Kikero not tumble down-stairs, and break at least three of his legs, in his hurry to call a public meeting for the redressing of so cruel a grievance? Not he: the man continued to strut up and down his library, in a toga as big as the "Times" newspaper, singing out—

"Cedant arma toga; concedat faurea laudi.”

And, if Kikero noticed the case at all, it was only as a fact that might be interesting to natural philosophers, or to speculators on the theories of a plenum and a vacuum, or to Greek physicians investigating the powers of the human stomach, or to connoisseurs in old women. No drachma or denarius, be well assured, ever left the secret lockers or hidden fobs of this discreet barrister upon so blind a commission as that of carrying consolation to a superfluous old woman—not enjoying so much as the jus suffragii. By a thousand indirect notices, it might be shown

* It is interesting to observe, at this moment, how the proofs accumulate from the ends of the earth that the Roman C was always in value equal to K. The imperial name of Cæsar has survived in two separate functions. It is found as a family name rooted amongst oriental peoples, and is always Keyser. But also it has survived as an official title, indicating the sovereign ruler. At this moment, from Milan, under the shadow of the Alps, to Lucknow, under the shadow of the Himalayas, this immortal Roman name popularly expresses the office of the supreme magistrate. Keyser is the current titular designation of the king who till lately reigned over Oude; and der Kayser, on the fiction which made the Empire of Germany a true lineal successor to the Western Roman Empire, has always indicated the Emperor-once German, now simply Austrian.

that an act of charity would, in the eyes of Pagan moralists, have taken rank as an act of drunkenness.

Yes, the great planetary orb of charity in its most comprehensive range-not that charity only which interprets for the best all doubtful symptoms, not that charity only which "hopeth all things," and which, even to the relenting criminal, gives back an opening for recovering his lost position by showing that for him also there is shining in the distance a reversionary hope-but that charity also which brings aid that is effectual, and sympathy that is unaffected, to the households sitting in darkness-this great diffusive orb, and magnetic centre of every perfect social system, first wheeled into its place and functions on that day when Christianity shot above the horizon. But the idea, but the principle, but the great revolutionary fountain of benediction, was all that Christianity furnished, or needed to furnish. The executive arrangements, the endless machinery, for diffusing, regulating, multiplying, exalting this fountain-all this belongs no longer to the Bible, but to man. And why not? What blindness to imagine that revelation would have promoted its own purposes by exonerating man from his share in the total work. So far from that, thus and no otherwise it was-viz., by laying upon man a necessity for co-operating with heaven -that the compound object of this great revolution had any chance of being accomplished. It was as much the object of Christianity that he who exercised charity should be bettered, as he that benefited by charity-the agent equally with the object. Only in that way is Shakspere's fine anticipation realised of a two-fold harvest, and a double moral won; for the fountain itself

"Is twice blessed:

It blesseth him that gives, and him that takes."