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through written or spoken elaboration of the matter I have here endeavoured to set forth, as through internal preparation, which will render one here and one there sensible to the magnetic influence of those who have already begun to radiate this life, and who will thus be drawn to it often almost in spite of themselves. But inasmuch as they will very soon find their own efforts powerless to enable them to realise the expectations here held out, and become conscious of a feebleness of will, and a physical, as well as a moral incapacity to fight successfully against those powers of darkness to which I have already alluded, and who will concentrate all their infernal enginery upon the aspirant feebly struggling to evolve his dormant faculties, and rise into new and higher conditions, a divine potency, hitherto latent in nature, has been developing during these latter years, to which allusion is made in the first chapter, and without which the stupendous task of the regeneration of man and of nature, through the instrumentality of man, would be utterly hopeless.

I will presently endeavour to describe what this potency is; how the world has been prepared to receive it; how it has been dimly foreshadowed in the sacred books of all religions, of which it is the fulfilment; and how at the moment when society is most threatened with revolution by explosive elements from below, it will descend from above with a counterenergy of construction, even more powerful, to enable man to rear a new and perfected social fabric upon the débris of the one which its own vices had laid low.

Before, however, entering upon this subject, it will be necessary to expose the weakness of all social and ecclesiastical institutions, and the dangers which threaten them, in consequence of the vices inherent in their operation and constitution.

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CHAPTER VI.

HISTORY OF THE EARLY CHRISTIAN CHURCH, A RECORD OF SWIFT DEMORALISATION; PARTLY OWING TO DESIRE TO MAKE CONVERTS, AND PARTLY TO THE SUBSTITUTION OF A FUTURE LIFE FOR PRESENT PRACTICE-CONFLICT BETWEEN ROME AND THE EAST-EXTINCTION OF GNOSTIC SECTS DESTRUCTIVE OF MUCH OF THE DEEPER TRUTHCOMPILATION OF THE PRESENT CANON OF SCRIPTURE UNTRUSTWORTHY APOCRYPHAL GOSPELS AND EPISTLES "THE TEACHING OF THE TWELVE APOSTLES "THE BOOK OF ENOCH-THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND ON THE VERGE OF A GREAT MORAL REVOLUTION THE CONFESSIONS OF A PARISH PRIEST-NEED OF A REFORMED CHRISTIANITY.

AN examination into the history of all existing religions will show us, either that the prophet or teacher himself adapted his morality to the conditions of the people he taught, as in the case of Moses and Mohammed-or that, if the teaching was too elevated for the masses, as in the case of Christ, and in a minor degree of Buddha, it was very soon reduced to their level by their followers.

The first instinct of the disciple is to deify the master; the second, to make concessions in order to gain converts. It never seems to have occurred to the disciples of those who enunciated the highest doctrine, that the ethics which it contained, should form the foundation upon which a new society should be reared, in which the moral standard thus suggested should be practicable. The desire of making converts invariably supersedes every other consideration. The history

of the early Christian Church is a lamentable record of swift demoralisation, largely owing to this cause. In the abandonment of the practice of having all things in common, in the disputes which arose between the disciples, in the suppression of the writings which were deemed authoritative.

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by the most spiritual and enlightened portion of the early Church, and the struggle between the worldly element-which founded a Church in the most dissolute capital in Europe, by reason of the concessions it made to the social conditions which prevailed in it—and the Gnostic sects, which, until extinguished, retained hold of the spiritual life which had been preserved in the Church of the brethren in Jerusalem, presided over by James, the brother of Christ,-we have the story of a spiritual fiasco unparalleled in the history of religious movements. No sooner was the great Personality removed from the midst of His followers, than those who had asked which should sit upon His right hand in heaven, began to struggle for the highest place here, and jealousies, rivalries, and bitternesses envenomed the infant communities,1 which were finally to give birth to the ecclesiastical monstrosities represented at this day at Jerusalem in the different angles of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, where, on the occasion of sacred Christian festivals, the worshippers over the tomb of the Lord of love, are only kept from flying at each other's throats by a strong guard of Moslem soldiery. The fact that the Church of the Holy Sepulchre is not over the tomb of Christ is a lie the more, but the desecration of His memory is none the less on that account. It has been reserved for the most sacred city in the world to represent the most degrading spectacle of human ignorance, superstition, and hypocrisy which exists anywhere in the nineteenth century; as it was reserved for those who call themselves the vicegerents of Christ on earth, to rival the wickedest sovereigns of their time in lust, cruelty, and the worst vices of the dark ages. These are they to whom Christ referred when He said, "Beware of false prophets, which come unto you in 'sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves. By 'their fruits ye shall know them."

Modern research is now happily enabling us to estimate at their true value the books which form what is called "the

1 In illustration of this, see the first chapter of the 1st Epistle of Clement to the Corinthians, in which he denounces "that wicked and detestable sedition, so unbecoming in the elect of God, which a few headstrong and self'willed men have fomented to such a degree of madness, that your venerable ' and renowned name, so worthy of all men to be beloved, is greatly blasphemed thereby."

canon of Scripture." We find that, so far as the New Testament is concerned, it is not possible to disconnect it from the bitter feud which originated in the divergent views of Peter and Paul, and their violent hostility towards each other.

While the Christian Church at Pella, where it was established after the destruction of Jerusalem, retained to some extent the pure spirit of the teaching of Christ, its rival at Rome was adapting itself to its worldly surroundings, and had already inaugurated that policy of compromise and duplicity which soon enabled it to claim a universal supremacy. Meantime at Alexandria, and throughout most of the Eastern Churches, the internal sense was clung to, and they were thus enabled to invoke-as such of their writings as have been preserved, show-a far purer and truer inspiration. It was, in fact, a war at last between the spirit and the letter, between the East and the West; and it is scarcely to be wondered at that the inspirations which animated the former should have been the purest, when we consider the corrupt social and political conditions under which the Church of Rome had struggled into life, as compared with the purer influences which surrounded the Gnostic communities and the Ethnico Christians. The quarrel culminated in what was known as the Marcion heresy, towards the end of the second century, and the canon of Scripture clearly bears on its record the traces of the struggle which terminated in the triumph of Rome, and the suppression of all that militated against the doctrines it had espoused. Hence we find that the Gospels have been tampered with, especially Luke's; that the Acts of the Apostles are an incorrect narrative of events, in which few traces of any lofty inspiration are to be found; and that interpolations have occurred in the various writings which were then collected to form the text-book of the religion, though even its compilers did not assert that they were infallibly inspired-that was a dogma that was not invented until many hundreds of years after.

I am aware that this will be controverted, and the martyrdoms and persecutions of nearly four hundred years will be pointed to as an evidence of the staunchness of the early Christians in Rome to their principles. But men will die for what they believe to be fundamental dogmas of faith, while

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they will yield for the sake of expediency, details which they consider of less importance, in the presence of an overwhelming pressure. Our records of the history of the first four or five centuries after Christ are too meagre to enable us to assert that belief as well as practice did not undergo great changes during that period. Indeed we have every right to assume, from the controversies and disputations that we know occurred, that they did. Although it has now become necessary to consider the compilers of the canon of Scripture to have been as fully inspired as the books we owe to their selection, their authority was not universally considered infallible at the time. Indeed, the divisions and scandals which took place among them, the numerous so-called heresies and sundry patristic discussions, fully justified scepticism on this point then, as it does still.

Thus we have St Paul's epistle to the Laodiceans, which, in his epistle to the Colossians, he expressly orders should be read in the Church, excluded from the canon of Scripture, with about twenty other books, which were deemed authoritative during the first four centuries in the Christian Churches, among them the epistles of Barnabas, Clement, and Ignatius, which contain many passages full of an inspiration as pure and lofty as are to be found in the canonical epistles.

When we investigate the constitution of the Council of Nice, convoked by the Emperor Constantine-himself not a Christian at the time, and a man of dissolute charactercharged with the high function of providing Christendom with its Bible, we find that it was composed of 318 violent partisans, of whom Sabinus, the Bishop of Heraclea, affirms that, "excepting Constantine himself and Eusebius Pamphilus, they were a set of illiterate creatures that understood nothing;" but then he was of the opposite faction. They began by quarrelling among themselves, and libelling each other to the Emperor; but we learn from Mosheim's Ecclesiastical History' that the Emperor burnt all their libels, and exhorted them to peace and amity; while Pappus tells us in his Synodican to the Council, that the means employed for discovering what books should be selected as canonical, was promiscuously to put all the books referred to the Council for deliberation, under the Communion-table in a church, when they besought