cation of another saying of the same prophet. "And it shall be, in the place where it was said unto them, you are not my people: there they shall be called the sons of the living God." And, worst of all, the strangers were to be preferred to the old domestics of the house of the Lord, for the words of Isaias, when he announces the adoption of the Gentiles and the reprobation of the Jews, were declared to be applicable to present times. "I was found by them that did not seek me: I appeared openly to them that asked not after me.' 993 But to Israel he saith, "All the day long have I spread my hands to a people that believeth not, and contradicteth me."

2

A large amount of spirituality, and a total absence of selfishness, were the dispositions necessary for the Jewish people as a preparation for the reception of Christ and his heavenly doctrine. If they had such dispositions in the era of the successors of Augustus Cæsar, they must have undergone a great revolution of sentiment and feeling within a few years, and must have realized a state of national morals, for which we are little prepared by their previous annals and history.

Such were, at the time of the Apostles, the elements of opposition to the Gospel in the Roman, Grecian, and Jewish societies-elements restless and chafing, repelling each other, but united in a common repugnance to all that is just and true; and it was among these that the Church was now to enter for the first time, and with them to combat for the mastery over the heart and intelligence of man. They may be summed up in a few words :-philosophy, pantheism, passion, prejudice, and pride. Philosophy occupied a place in the minds of the educated Greeks and Romans of the day, offering as it did, a thousand solutions. for the moral problems that are most interesting to man, and chained in a particular manner to Grecian society as a principle and centre of the olden glories of the PeloponThe poetry and literature of the age were tinged

nesus.

1 Osee i. 10. 2 Romans x. 20, 21. 3 Isaias lxv. 1. 4 Isaias lxv. 2.

and affected by the partiality of each writer for some philosophic system. Rome was full of philosophers. Judaism, with its prejudices and antipathies, was not confined to Judea, for the Jewish race had been scattered long before through the nations of Asia and Eastern Europe; and they dwelt there at the time of which we write with their synagogues, their peculiar institutions and traditions; and the further they were removed from home, the more strongly they appeared to be confirmed in their utter hatred of all that is not "the law." Then there was Roman society, the most antagonistic of all to the "good tidings" that were about to be made to the world. A universal corruption of morals prevailed there, and the light which God had enkindled in man, appeared to have gone out there in utter darkness, so deluded were the men, worshipping their idea of the Divinity, and including in their conception of God attributes of crime, lust, and weakness. In a word, crime and power were on the side of the "kingdom of this darkness;" but how striking was the contrast presented by the invading army of the "children of light."

DIVISION IV.

CONFLICT OF CHRISTIANITY WITH JEWS, GREEKS,
AND ROMANS.

§ 1. Prospects of Success.-The Apostles, as one of themselves declares somewhere, were in a certain sense "the last of men," and certainly in the circumstances of their mission and opponents, the designation can scarcely be said to be exaggerated. They were the last men in the world that, in the human view, would appear to be fit instruments for the subjugation of error, as it then existed,

1

or the propagation of Christian truth. It is but little to say of them that they were Jews, of an obscure and despised nation; they were, with a few exceptions, of the humblest class of Jewish society, and they were devoid of learning and human knowledge. They were, as St. Paul 1 says, "the foolish things of the world," and "the weak things of the world, and "the things that are contemptible," and the "things that are not." This was not all; they were the heralds of a new philosophy, which to sensual human nature was revolting in its principles, while in practice it was destructive of the cherished idol, self-love. The Christian religion, which it was their mission to diffuse, was the embodiment of poverty, mortification, patience, humility, denial, disengagement from this world. Its speculative sublime science of the incarnation of the Son of God, might perhaps be listened to with patience by such as were accustomed to the theories of Plato; but the deification of the austere moral virtues in the person of Christ on the cross, was a practical lesson, for which no one was prepared, and from which philosophy in its most unearthly forms recoiled. And yet this one lesson was the epitome of all they had to say, and it was the first stone in the edifice they had to build :-"We preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews indeed a stumbling-block, and unto the Gentiles foolishness: But unto them that are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God." It was this preaching of "Christ crucified," that constituted the real difficulty, in a human sense, to the propagation of Gospel truth; the chances of success were diminished by the circumstances of the nation, the position, the outward appearance of the men who preached, and obstacles apparently insurmountable must meet them at every step in the prejudice of the Jews, and the philosophy and profligacy of the Gentiles.

2

Let us carefully examine the method of enforcing truth, pursued by the Apostles, and the means they adopted for propagating Christianity and attracting converts to the

1 1 Cor. i. 27 et seq.

2 1 Cor. i. 23, 24.

2

faith. In the beginning of the seventh century Asia saw a new creed, announced at the point of the sword, and pushed upon reluctant kingdoms, by war, pillage, confiscation, and death. The mild genius of Christianity was not such. The extermination of the wicked nations of Palestine, to make way for God's chosen people, had been a command under the law of terror; under the law of love, the tone was altered, and peace and mercy, were to be the announcements of the divine messengers. "How beautiful are the feet of them that preach the gospel of peace, of them that bring glad tidings of good things!" said a prophet, looking forward to the coming of the Apostles. In our own days, money, food, clothes, and such inducements were held out in certain impoverished countries, as motives for a change of faith. To become a Protestant in Ireland, in the year 1846, was to become plump, welldressed, and a picture of material comfort. Such a mode of propagating religious opinions was in the circumstances manifestly opposed to the law of God. "Everything," says St. Paul," which is not according to faith," that is, according to conviction or conscience, "is sin." The immediate result of such a system, was to make men profess and practise a religion that was contrary to their convictions; the ultimate effect of it, was a confirmed habit of the lowest moral depravity and dissimulation. It may be a question, whether the purchase of consciences to Christianity by the Apostles, whose conviction was unwavering, and principles manifestly true, would have been contrary to any maxim of revealed morality. Probably not: if such a change were merely external, if the judgment of the converts was suspended until such time as truth should be demonstrated, if it amounted merely to a promise on the part of the disciple to examine the proffered principles, with an engagement on the part of the teacher to demonstrate their truth. Even with this limitation, the traffic in religious convictions would lead to the saddest results. Certain it is, that Divine Providence did not make use of it as a means for the

1 Quoted by St. Paul-Romans x. 15.

2

Isaias lii. 7.

diffusion of Christianity. The apostles were poor men; they had nothing to offer, nothing to give but faith and grace. They laboured for their daily sustenance, "working with their own hands." What St. Paul says of himself, was literally true of them all; their days were spent in "hunger and thirst, in fastings often, in cold and nakedness." The purchase of the right to educate and bring up children in the doctrines of the Reformation, was another means by which Protestantism was attempted to be propagated in modern times. Such a practice involved the deprivation of a privilege actually acquired by baptism; and as it operated in secret, while the infant mind was yet shrouded, and the faculties of unawakened reason were still inactive and unperceiving, it was equivalent to a robbery of the most serious and grievous character. Error might be taken away by such means without moral guilt; truth could not. Children might be bought to a religious system, demonstrated and true, unwavering, fixed, guaranteed by God, derived from his revelation, with actual merit to the purchasers; but to an uncertain system, unfixed principles, a system originating with men of unproved mission and suspected motives, children could not be so aggregated without much hypocritical affectation and fearful moral responsibility. The apostles bought no consciences. They did not surreptitiously possess themselves of the young, the sleeping, the unsuspecting. They proposed truth openly, and spoke it out in the broad day. Their aim was to make truth heard, and preach the "word of God" to nations waking and vigilant. "Faith," said one of them, "comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of Christ," and "their (the Apostles') sound hath gone forth into all the earth, and their words unto the ends of the whole world."3

Neither by violent means, nor by the gentle inducement of a bribe to the grown and thinking, nor by the surreptitious purchase of the young, did the Apostles endeavour to propagate the doctrines of the Redeemer among the 2 Rom. x. 17. 3 Rom. x. 18.

1 2 Cor. xi. 27.