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N the year 375 A. D. the Christian Emperor Valentinian crossed the Danube with his troops determined on a war of extermination. The trembling barbarians, conscious of guilt and unable to resist, sent ambassadors to deprecate his wrath. With difficulty he is persuaded to grant them admittance to his council chamber.

With downcast look and bended form they approach the throne. But there is a dark frown on the emperor's face, and his whole aspect is that of a man provoked beyond endurance. For twelve years past his energies have been taxed to ward off their assaults. He has fought them in many successful campaigns. He has undergone endless toil and peril, and once has escaped the death-stroke of their javelins only by the fleetness of his spirited war-horse.

He has dotted the Rhine with fortified posts from its source to its mouth, and invented a great number of new appliances and engines of war with which to equip them. And yet after all they have broken through, and, in the last harvest season, ravaged some of the fairest provinces of the empire, inhumanly killing and de

stroying what they could not carry off, cutting to pieces two of the legions, and spreading terror to the foot of the Alps.

No wonder the emperor, following their retreat and beholding the ruin of his country, is wrought up to the highest pitch of exasperation. Not the lowly bearing and supplicating tones of the trembling envoys can appease his resentment. It breaks forth in stern rebuke. He reviles their baseness, he upbraids their ingratitude, he chides their insolence, he denounces in fiery invective their treachery and inhumanity. And as he recounts their injurious acts his pent-up fury grows more and more violent. His eyes flash, his color rises, his gestures are angry, his voice chokes with rage, and his whole frame is convulsed with ungovernable passion; when, suddenly, in the midst of his speech, he swoons and is caught in the arms of his attendants. A blood vessel has been ruptured; and he whose reign has been spent in beating off the tribes dies in a last effort to chastise their insolence.

And essentially like his were the careers of three other emperors. Constantius, son of Constantine, found his abilities taxed to the utmost in the work of defense. The brilliant Julian spent almost the whole of his active life and won his renown in campaigning on the northern frontiers, and Theodosius the Great, the wise and good ruler, the brave and able general, wore himself out in defensive wars. These four sovereigns, Constantius, Julian, Valentinian and Theodosius, whose reigns cover nearly the whole of the fifty-eight years of the Christian empire from the death of Constantine to the division of that empire under Honorius and Arcadius, sons of Theodosius, had it for their chief work, in the providence of God, to hold in check the restless tribes of the

north, the chief of whom bore the well-known names of Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Huns and Vandals.

Behold the fulfillment of the prophetic words of John: "AFTER THIS I SAW FOUR ANGELS STANDING AT THE FOUR CORNERS OF THE EARTH, THAT NO WIND SHOULD BLOW ON THE EARTH, OR ON THE SEA, OR UPON ANY TREE."

But what is the purpose of this half-century of impending but averted danger? Look at a scene in the city of Alexandria in the reign of Theodosius and the question will be answered.

On an eminence commanding a wide prospect of city and har bor stands the temple of Serapis, surrounded this morning by a vast excited throng of mingled Pagans and Christians. In the midst of the sacred enclosure, seated upon a throne, is the colossal statue of the false god. In his left hand is a sceptre. His right grasps the writhing form of a serpent with a hideous head and a triple tail, displaying at the extremities the heads of a dog, a lion and a wolf. The Pagans believe that such awful sanctity invests the idol that if any hand of man should venture to assault it both heaven and earth would instantly collapse and return to the primitive chaos.

But the imperial edict for its destruction has been issued, and this is the day for its execution. Imagine the horror and fear of the Pagans as they stand helplessly by awaiting the fatal moment! And even the Christians are silent, not yet wholly freed from a superstitious dread, and for the moment not even the officers of the law have courage to advance to their work. But at length a Christian soldier, bolder than his comrades, steps forward, plants his ladder against the image, ascends, whirls aloft his weighty