ble miracles attributed to him were performed in casting out devils. The belief in diabolic possession had been abandoned by physicians and philosophers of Greece more than three centuries before the Christian era; and its acceptance by Jesus implies that, instead of being divinely wise as he should have been to properly exercise supernatural power, he was behind the enlightenment of his

age.

If a supernatural religion is one that is revealed in a complète and unchangeable form when first published, then of all religions Christianity is the least miraculous. No other was at first presented to the world in terms so vague. No other developed so many forms. No other appropriated its doctrines and discipline from such a variety of individuals, sects, and nations. No other continued to gain important accretions at intervals during twenty-five centuries,—for so long was the period from Hilkiah to Pius IX., both of whom contributed to the books accepted as authoritative by many Christians. No other diverged into such a multitude of highly discordant creeds. No other provoked so many cruel persecutions and destructive sectarian wars. Unlike Jesus, Siddhartha and Mohammed, his great rivals in the foundation of universal religions, not only announced their purposes of founding new faiths in unmistakable terms, but they organized their churches with a complete equipment of creed and discipline which have been maintained without material variation to the present time.

The gospels are so late in date, so uncertain in authorship, and so conflicting in their statements, that we know little with reasonable certainty about Jesus, except that he lived; that he was a Nazarene Jew; that he went about Palestine gathering Jewish followers, or disciples; that

they regarded him as the Messiah; and that in the reign of Tiberius he was tried, convicted, and crucified as a rebel. After his death his disciples maintained their organization, asserted that he had founded a new sect, and sought to gain converts. They required the observance of the Mosaic ceremonial law, which implied that faith in Christ as they represented it was merely a form of Judaism. Three years after the crucifixion, Paul, a man whom Jesus had not taught, and whom the twelve apostles had not accepted as a convert, began, without their approval, to preach the doctrine, given to him by special revelation, that faith in Christ was emancipated from the bondage of Mosaic ceremony, and was offered on equal terms to Jew and Gentile as a new and universal religion.

According to Acts, the twelve apostles for years after the crucifixion continued "daily with one accord in the temple." This means that they worshiped by sacrifice, that they accepted Jerusalem as the only place of worship, and that they observed the Sabbath and the three great annual festivals of the Jews. The demolition of the temple, the destruction of Jerusalem, and the dispersion of the followers of the twelve apostles in 70 A. D., liberated the Pauline churches from the authority of the Judaizing Christians.

Neither in the evangels nor in the epistles of the New Testament do we find any explicit mention of the Christian Sunday as a substitute for the Jewish Sabbath or of the Christian Easter for the Jewish Passover; of the establishment of baptism, marriage, and ordination as sacraments; of the Christian revelation; of the apostolical succession; of the institution of the parish in which all the believing inhabitants should be subjected to occasional

drill and to constant supervision by the priest; of the diocese in which the parish priests should be subjected to drill and supervision by the bishop; of the province in which the bishops should be under the supervision of a council and a metropolitan bishop; of the incarnation; of the Trinity; of the combination of the divine and human natures and wills in Jesus; of transubstantiation; of the immaculate nature of the mother of Jesus; or of the primacy, supremacy, and infallibility of the bishop of Rome. All of these ideas were to be introduced afterwards, and many of them in times and places of which we have no definite information.

In its main features Christianity is an Aryan religion. It is Semitic in the place of its origin, in the name derived from the man who was the occasion of its foundation, and in little more. Paul, its chief author, though a Jew in blood, was a Greek in education. Athenian philosophy made him familiar with a God who has no favorite nation, no sacred city, and no regard for sacrifices. These are the most important ideas at the basis of the new religion. Its early creed is Greek; its sacerdotal organization is Roman; its dominant spirit in modern times is Teutonic. From the start, Christianity showed that it was peculiarly adapted to the mental constitution or to the social and political condition of the Euraryan peoples. It gained few converts among most of the Asiatic Aryans, among the Persians, the Afghans, the Belooches and the Hindoos; it failed almost completely among the Semites, the Chinese, and the Tartars. But it had scarcely been presented to the Greeks, the Romans, the Celts, the Teutons, and the Slavs before it obtained a secure foothold among them, and within several centuries it had complete dominion over them because it was Aryan in its character.

The most important fact in the life of Jesus, the one that is brought forward most prominently by the evangels and the epistles, and the one that is the most trustworthy indication of the purpose of his ministry, is that he claimed to be the Messiah. This title, as understood by priests and people, was a declaration of an intention to re-establish the Jewish monarchy. It would throw insuperable difficulties in the way of a man laboring to organize a new sect, or church; it might be of great service to a man plotting rebellion. The Jew who in the time of Jesus called himself the Messiah was either a rebel or a lunatic.

If there is one institution of supernatural origin it is Christianity; and if there is one miracle on record, it is the resurrection of Jesus offered to the world as a proof of his divine commission. But neither in history nor in science is one supernatural institution or event established by satisfactory proof; in neither of those great departments of thought has anything ever been traced directly and immediately to miraculous influence; in no known case has the operation of natural law been interrupted by a special interposition of divine providence; and in thousands of cases, claims of such interposition have been examined by scientific authorities and proved to be baseless. The conclusion is that there have been no miracles; that Christianity is a product of evolution; and that within the reach of human observation, the domain of natural law has never been disturbed by supernatural interference.

APPENDIX.

In this volume, as in previous ones, references are made to the Bible, by book, chapter and verse, of the authorized version. In some cases all the citations of a paragraph are brought together in one note. References to Livy are made by book and chapter.

NOTES.

SEC. 421. Rome in Culture.-The history of the Roman republic by Mommsen takes rank with the works of Grote and Thucydides, among the best of its class. It closes with the death of Julius Cæsar, after which date, for two centuries and a half, Merivale's Romans under the Empire is the best authority. For the general course of events in Europe after 100 A. D. Gibbon is excellent, though the decline of the empire, as he understood it, did not commence until 300 A. D. Long's history of the decline of the republic is accurate in details, but is not attractive to the general reader. As a very brief history Liddell has decided merits; and so has Merivale's History of Rome, which is to be distinguished from his history of the Romans under the Empire.

Ihne's history of the republic is a work of much merit. G. C. Lewis' Credibility of Early Roman History is the most complete treatise and the highest authority on the subject. All its main points may be considered established. Marquardt, Mommsen, Becker, and Friedlander are the leading authorities in regard to the details of the industry, commerce, and social and ecclesiastical relations of ancient Rome.

SEC. 423. Legendary Period.-1This is Niebuhr's opinion as expressed by Liddell (74). Merivale (R. U. E. ii. 397) thus states it: "These stories, whatever be their actual truth, serve at least to paint the heroic ideal of the nation."

Niebuhr wrote the history of Rome down to 370 B. C., and then his valuable work was interrupted by death. Upon the period of which he treated, he threw a flood of light. The record of the