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. For 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 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 com munities 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 enlighted Christian: whereas a Pagan could seldom in one generation pass beyond the infirmity of his noviciate. 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 unanimi.. ty 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 point-blank range of the state artillery-there is an end, once and for ever, to the delusive superstition, that, merely by its silent presence in the world, Christianity must instantaneously come into fierce activity as a re-agency 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 ratlier 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 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; viz. both as to the possibility of Christianity co-existing 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 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 every where 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 man-through his reason, his will, his affections. But, to satisfy the Fathers, it must operate like a drug-like sympathetic powderslike 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 proclama

aspete to the induite situations of k'a cuenta—often very wise counsels ; ating wimately engrafted on the stem of datrous religion-as Geriving, in the last resort, their kanctions from Pagan deities, and therefore as staring constructively in 2411 the posutions of that tainted

Now, therefore, if Christiasity, 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 neutralized 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 coexist in the same society than two queen-bees in a hive-as though elementary nature herself recoiled from the abominable concursus-do but

COOKIE HANC was true caly for the Bouzern worst of evilizance. The forests of Germany, wong pierced aready to the south in the third and fourth centuries by the torch of missocaries—twuogo aready at that time inamicated by the immortal Gothic version of the New Testament preeeding Upplas, and still survive ing-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, (viz. 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 most horrid temples

which rang so searchingly in the ears of Zosimus, extorting, at every blow, a howl of Pagan sympathy from that ignorant calumniator of Christianity. So far from the fact being, according to the general prejudice, as though Constantine had found himself able to destroy Paganism, and to replace it by Christianity; on the contrary, it was both because he happened to be far too weak, in fact, for such a mighty revolution, and because he knew his own weakness, that he fixed his new capital, as a preliminary caution, upon the Propontis. There were other motives to this change, and particularly (as we have attempted to show in a separate dissertation) motives of high political economy, suggested by the relative conditions of land and agriculture in Thrace and Asia Minor, by comparison with decaying Italy; but a paramount motive, we are satisfied, and the earliest motive, was the incurable Pagan bigotry of Rome. Paganism for Rome, it ought to have been remembered by historians, was a mere necessity of her Pagan origin. Paganism was the fatal dowery of Rome from her inauguration; not only she had once received a retaining fee on behalf of Paganism, in the mysterious Ancile, supposed to have fallen from heaven, but she actually preserved this bribe amongst her rarest jewels. She possessed a palladium, such a national amulet or talisman as many Grecian or Asiatic cities had once possesseda fatal guarantee to the prosperity of the state. Even the Sibylline books, whatever ravages they might be supposed by the intelligent to have sustained in a lapse of centuries, were popularly believed, in the latest period of the Western empire, to exist as so many charters of supremacy. Jupiter himself in Rome had put on a peculiar Roman physiognomy, which associated him with the destinies of the gigantic state. Above all, the solemn augury of the twelve vultures, so memorably passed downwards from the days of Romulus, through generations as yet uncertain of the event, and,

therefore, chronologically incapable of participation in any fraud-an augury always explained as promising twelve centuries of supremacy to Rome, from the year 748 or 750 B.C.-co-operated with the endless other Pagan superstitions in anchoring the whole Pantheon to the Capitol and Mount Palatine. So long as Rome had a worldly hope surviving, it was impossible for her to forget the Vestal Virgins, the College of Augurs, or the indispensable office and the indefeasible privileges of the Pontifex Maximus, which (though Cardinal Baronius, in his great work, for many years sought to fight off the evidences for that fact, yet afterwards partially he confessed his error) actually availed

historically and medallically can be demonstrated to have availed-for the temptation of Christian Cæsars into collusive adulteries with heathenism. Here, for instance, came an emperor that timidly recorded his scruplesfeebly protested, but gave way at once as to an ugly necessity. There came another, more deeply religious or constitutionally more bold, who fought long and strenuously against the compromise. "What! should he, the delegate of God, and the standardbearer of the true religion, proclaim himself officially head of the false! No: that was too much for his conscience." But the fatal meshes of prescription-of superstitions ancient and gloomy-gathered around him: he heard that he was no perfect Cæsar without this office, and eventually the very same reason which had obliged Augustus not to suppress but himself to assume the tribunitian office-viz. that it was a popular mode of leaving democratic organs untouched, whilst he neutralized their democratic functions by absorbing them into his own-availed to overthrow all Christian scruples of conscience even in the most Christian of the Cæsars many years after Constantine. The pious Theodosius found himself literally compelled to become a Pagan pontiff. A bon mot circulating amongst the people warned him