for what to them seemed vain subtleties. "Until the fall of Jerusalem, the rule which the Romans adopted in administration, was to remain completely indifferent to these sectarian quarrels." Tros Tyriusve they were for treating nullo discrimine. We might apply the spirit, if not quite the letter, of a couplet in one of Dryden's dramatic prologues :

"Jove was alike to Latian and to Phrygian ;

And you well know, a play's of no religion,”—

(upon which last clause, may be, Dean Close would put an assenting construction, all his own). Gibbon writes that the innocence of the first Christians was protected by ignorance and contempt, the tribunal of the Pagan magistrate often proving their most assured refuge against the fury of the synagogue. In the case of Paul of Samosata the same historian observes : "As a Pagan and as a soldier, it could scarcely be expected that Aurelian should enter into the discussion, whether the sentiments of Paul or those of his adversaries were most agreeable to the standard of the orthodox faith," though the emperor's decision has the praise of being founded on the general principles of equity and reason. Again, Gibbon describes Constantine, in A.D. 324, as being "yet ignorant of the difficulty of appeasing the quarrels of theologians," and accordingly addressing to Alexander and to Arius a moderating epistle, in which he attributed the origin of the whole controversy to a trifling and subtle question concerning an incomprehensible point of the law, and [lamented that the Christian people, who had the same God, the same religion, and the same worship, should be divided by such inconsiderable distinctions. Constantine turned over a new leaf anon, and came to regard the support of the orthodox faith as the most sacred and important duty of the civil magistrate; and we have to turn over many leaves in the history of the empire's decline and fall, without often coming upon an emperor of the type of Michael the Stammerer (A.D. 821), who treated image-worship with such contemptuous impartiality, declaring that he knew nothing of these ecclesiastical quarrels, and that he would maintain the

laws and enforce an equal toleration. Caviare to the general was doctrine, and practice, such as this. The general are apt to regard such rulers much as Rufus Lyon's housekeeper regarded that fine gentleman, whose "air of worldly exaltation unconnected with chapel," was painfully suggestive to Lyddy of Herod, Pontius Pilate, or the "much-quoted Gallio." And if from George Eliot we are off at a tangent to Sir Walter Scott, it is for the sake of his reference to the Covenanters' distrust of Henry Morton, whose prudence they termed a trusting in the arm of flesh, and whose avowed tolerance for those of religious sentiments and observances different from his own, "obtained for him the nickname of Gallio," as caring for none of these things. The age of the Covenanters might be one in which there was a rising school of rational theology, and in which latitudinarianism was of active force as well as passive weight; but the accepted and approved feeling towards Gallio was that indicated by Robert South, when in one of his sermons he took that " much-quoted man for an exact type of "tha: temper of mind, that indifference in things spiritual," which is begotten in the minds of its worldly-wise followers by "policy, the great idol of a carnal reason," insensibly working the soul to "a despisal of religion." Few things can better mark the distinction with a difference between the theological tone of the seventeenth century and of the nineteenth, than the style in which Gallio is discussed, in either age, by the leaders of opinion. From the pages of one potent Review alone, in our own day, might be culled, at frequent intervals, repeated notices of Gallio, always more or less commendatory or sympathetic. These recurrent references betoken the sort of charm that is nowadays felt in the man, or in the subject. At one time he is made the theme of an elaborate essay, with his name for the title of it, the writer deeming it strange that, in this time of civil and religious liberty, "nobody should have a good word for Gallio," whose hard lot has been to be set forth as a type of carelessness and scepticism, to be scouted by name as a byword of reproach-his sole crime appearing to consist in his having refused to listen to the accusations against the Apostle

Paul, and having looked on with profound unconcern at a bastinado inflicted upon the chief ruler of the synagogue. The possibility is conceded that a modern magistrate would have felt it his duty to interfere to prevent any and every breach of the peace; but a beating is not a serious matter among Oriental communities, and when inflicted upon a Jew would be deemed a bagatelle; and at all events, as far as the Apostle was concerned, Gallio "can claim the posthumous credit of having released him from his captors without even waiting to call on him for his defence." His decision was grounded on the principle of the non-interference of the State in matters of purely religious discipline and controversy,-" Libera chiesa in stato libero," and such being his decision, it became wholly unnecessary for him to hear the prisoner at all. "We do not even know that the Apostle wished to be heard, but in any case Gallio did nothing beyond what the strictest and most orthodox Bow Street magistrate of the nineteenth century would have done." The sole point, it is urged, to be plausibly alleged against his character seems to be his appearing not to have been converted to Christianity before the Apostle opened his mouth to convert him, while the opportunities of religious investigation which he enjoyed were not extensive; whence the plea in his behalf, that, provided he discharged with propriety the only secular duty he was called on to perform, he does not merit the opprobrium of being a careless thinker, any more than that of being an unjust judge.—At another time, another apologist for Gallio in the same Review is less thoroughgoing, and affirms his real fault to have been a gross breach of his duty as a magistrate; inasmuch as a shameful disturbance and assault happened in court before his own eyes, and he did not do his duty in putting it down. At another, it is submitted that even supposing the point at issue between St. Paul and the Jews to have been "a petty sectarian squabble," the particular matter which Gallio cared not to take cognizance of was the public beating of the Jewish Rabbi before the judgment-seat. At another, the reviewer of some Chinese correspondence on the rights and claims of missionaries, spoke of diplomatists as

seldom required to discuss the supposed conflict of spiritual and temporal duties, and of our Foreign Secretary as habitually emulating the statesmanlike neutrality of Gallio, whose “determination to confine himself to his proper functions has been persistently misunderstood for eighteen centuries." Arguing that the charge against the deputy, of indifference to religious truth, must be considered as not proven, his ablest advocate further contends that the charge is singularly inconsistent in the mouths of those who prefer it against him; it being illogical in ecclesiastical commentators to upbraid the Executive of the Roman Empire at one time for interfering, and at another for not interfering, in the early controversy between Christianity and its assailants. "One of two things is obvious—either that the Imperial Government was lax or not lax upon subjects of Pagan orthodoxy; but it is idle to accuse its agents simultaneously of scepticism and of tyranny." In point of fact, the line drawn by Gallio between what was and what was not a matter for State inquiry, is shown to have been conformable to the principles of Imperial Rome, which could not afford, with her enormous frontier and her system of outlying province, to be anything else but tolerant. And we are reminded that if Gallio had chosen to investigate the Apostle's orthodoxy, he would have had to investigate it not merely from a Jewish point of view, but so as to decide whether his opinions were consistent or not with allegiance to the Roman Emperor: Gallio's "abstinence from unnecessary inquisitiveness was therefore rather a political virtue than a theological vice." Dean Stanley, indeed, goes so far as to take Gallio for his model statesman, on the ground that, however often and vehemently reviled as a careless libertine, he showed the true judicial attitude towards petty sectarian squabbles of which he could take no cognizance.

F

XXXII.

A LAST PARTING.

ACTS xx. 36-38.

ROM Miletus, bound for Jerusalem, St. Paul sent to Ephesus, and called the elders of the church. He was to take leave of them there and then, and it was to be a last parting. He told them how well he knew that not one of them all, among whom he had gone preaching the kingdom of God, should see his face again. Bound for Jerusalem, he knew not what should befall him there, beyond the bonds and afflictions that assuredly awaited him. But this one thing he did know, and he would have his friends from Ephesus know it equally well, that they, all of them, should see his face no more. And when he had spoken to them all his farewell charge, given them his last counsel, warning, comfort,-he kneeled down and prayed with them all. And they all wept sore, and fell on Paul's neck, and kissed him,-sorrowing most of all for the words which he spake, that they should see his face no more.

And was not he too moved? There is emotion instinct in

every sentence of his farewell words. The Apostle was also a man, a man of like passions with themselves, with a heart none the less warm that it was the great heart of so great a man. The record of the parting is told with touches of nature that make the whole world of readers kin. This Jew of Tarsus was one of ourselves in the ties of human affection, in the bonds of our common humanity. Except these bonds? Nay, there was no such exception here. He would be both almost, and altogether, such as we are, not excepting these bonds. Hath not a Jew eyes?-eyes to fill at the prompting of emotion, to shed tears as copious as those of any Ephesian elder that fell on his neck, and kissed him, before accompanying him to the ship. Hath not a Jew hands? hands to grasp, and press, and hold fast those of his fellows, Jewish or Christian or both. Hath not a Jew organs, dimensions, senses,