added to the coffers of the empire. And we mark the virulence of hate with which they are pursued. In reputation or fame they would destroy them as they had destroyed them in estate. It is the story of Carthage again to be told. Woe to the stricken, whose enemy has the making of their history. And we note the turn given to such incidents in the pages of the then respectable historians of these times. Thus we take a note from Chapter XVI. of his history, where Gibbon summarizes the account of Dion Cassius, a native of Nicaea, who flourished about the third century. "In Cyrene they massacred two hundred and twenty thousand Greeks; in Cyprus two hundred and forty thousand; in Egypt a great multitude. Many of these unhappy victims were sawed asunder, according to a precedent to which David had given the sanction by his example. The victorious Jews devoured the flesh, licked up the blood, and twisted the entrails like a girdle round their bodies." Thus the perversion of fact. Its malevolence breathes in every word, but it shows the sort of story that was greedily accepted wherever this miserable people were now concerned. Its falsity and absurdity is patent on the face of it. Undoubtedly, with their numerous ramifications, their straight living, their fanatical zeal, the Jews may have become a great power in the world, but we doubt if they were ever in sufficient force to have executed the atrocities narrated. On the contrary-wretched, weak, hated, and now despised-in many a place it was Rome alone that stood between them and their would-be executioners. Her attitude in Antioch was typical even if cynical. There the Greeks and natives would have exterminated them. Rome would hear of no such murder. Failing this they would have driven them into banishment. But where? their own country desolated. This denied, they should at least be deprived of their social privileges. And wherefore? once more demanded the imperial master. They had given no assistance to their people in Jerusalem; wherefore should they share

their doom? But for all that, it needed Rome's strong hand to shield them, so odious were they, so anxious was a vengeful world to balance the reckonings of the past. The facts of this animosity are undoubted; the reason for its violence is not so apparent. Had mankind equally rejoiced over a Rome destroyed? But never was ruin so absolute, so complete. With the destruction of their city-their temple, the centre of their race, no more-they were crushed to the earth and from the proudest of confederations were become exiles without a country, strangers without a home. And longings unutterable pursue them through the ages. Wistfully they eye many a wretched race which, poor in all else, is yet inestimably rich in a country which it can call its own. Only an idea, may be, but some ideas are more real than many a harsher actuality of life. And in Jerusalem was type of their own fallen fortunes. Over it night broods. The pall of a great darkness overshadows. Words fail to convey a sense of the overwhelming desolation that had overtaken them and the city of their fathers and the centre of their faith. To reproduce such feelings we must go to music alone. In the long wail of some soul-piercing melody one may possibly get a glimmer of those days that were, but no grosser medium of expression can convey such thought. A great spiritual power had gone out of the world. With the destruction of Jerusalem the world had sunk many degrees in the scale of civilization. All that the Jewish God stood for in a pagan world—and it stood for far more than is generally credited-was blotted out, and whether in itself it accepted or not the later development of its faith, for those times it stood for the highest phase of religious or moral thought that God had yet given to the world. And it had gone out, and the night was black. The sun, maybe, had risen, but clouds still darkened its full glory, and at best on the horizon was but promise of the dawn.

PART III-continued.

Ethical Ideal in Creedless Christianity.

¶ 72.

CHAPTER XXI.

THE ETHICAL IDEAL.

EXPERIENCE is a hard master, but its lessons come home. And from the terrible doom of the Jews the truth is to emerge that no race, no nation, family, no man even, shall live to himself alone and not deplore it in the end.

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As far as the world is concerned, this is the great lesson to be learnt from their past. To the Jew God had given much; but ever the same blot-and it is to make of every blessing a curse, of every joy a sorrow, and of every hope despair-he is entirely self-centred. His God is for himself alone. The world and its increase are his sole inheritance. As he grew in ability, in strength, and in wealth, he above all increased in arrogance and pride of heart. To him mankind was but as slave or servant; not even as younger brother. And the world rose and destroyed him.

Maybe, he was no whit worse than his fellow, but in his very pre-eminence the lime-light of history has been turned upon him. To this also is the added interest that as a race he still persists, whilst his contemporaries are but memories alone. The Persian has passed away; the Greek; the Roman; the Egyptian; he only remains.

And we ponder on the lesson of his past. The mad dog of the world, hated by all, every nation delighting in his humiliation, we realize how this terrible lesson was burnt into his very being. Did he appreciate it; did he learn it; did he even acknowledge it? Baited on every hand, the detestation would be reciprocated until a frenzy of hate would mark his attitude to his

fellow man. But in part only. Men find the world much as they seek it, and so the Jews. And as ever we see them widely divided amongst themselves. Mutual recriminations are to poison existence; bitterness of soul is to be the heritage of all. And in the extremists we are to find change. With the desolation of the race has come new outlook. The vanities of this life have become a faded dream; their visions are of a kingdom yet to be theirs, but a kingdom as their whilom Master had once taught them, not of this world. Their old enthusiasm for the higher life remains, but it is to seek outlet in other directions. Amongst them we are to find many exquisitely beautiful minds as witness so much of the New Testament itself. Its very preservation is testimony to those who must have loved its thought. And this is a fact lost sight of by many a critic. However we have these writings, there must have been those who delighted in them. And it is in them we find this bald lesson of experience put into exquisite teaching and, given a doctrinal character, treasured by those to whom it thus appealed. This is the secret of Christianity. Its truths went home to some human heart at the time, or they would never have come down to us. That is the great fact of their preservation. They live to-day because they lived then. As to the particular way of their being handed down, again human agency is marked in every line; but they have been handed down. Our canon is selection from innumerable similar writings, but it is the mind and heart of the selectors behind it all that is the illuminating fact. And how little we would incorporate of other writings then current and some of which are still in existence. We have the gospels of "The infancy of Jesus Christ," and of "The birth of Mary," the gospels of James and of Thomas and of Nicodemus. We have "The Sayings of Jesus," and a letter of the King of Edessa to our Lord, and we have the letter of our Lord in reply. We have the correspondence of Paul with Seneca, and his epistle to the Laodiceans. We have

the epistles of Clement, of Barnabas, of Ignatius, and of Polycarp, as well as the visions, commands and similitudes of Hermas. All these were of authority in their day. We read them and mark how admirably the canon was collected and revised. And in its very selection we see the germ of that ethical ideal which is to be the distinguishing feature of the new religion. Maybe it was born of past experience: maybe living in hate with all men proved terrible to many a Jew; maybe a craving for love became a passion; maybe all this; but here is the fact-we have this ideal established not merely as an effusion or some beautiful philosophical conception, but as an integral part of life itself.

73. And here for one moment we would again emphasize the fact that life is a duality. It is neither philosophy alone nor conduct alone, but the moral momentum of the two. It is not enough to have a magnificent ideal, unless it is also found to some extent in expression in actual life. And the measure of a religion is not the measure of its doctrine alone, nor of its practice alone, but of the two working together. And thus it may well be that we have two nominally the same faiths, but with the widest difference possible in the measure of their value. All tending to establish the simple fact that sweeping generalizations are mostly wrong. The maddest reasons are sometimes given for the wisest of actions, whilst beauty of justification is never wanting for the most contemptible of deeds. If we are called upon to judge at all, every particular case must be judged on its own particular merits, when both theory and practice will equally demand our attention.

And it is in the measure of its moral momentum that Christianity must find its justification. As a philosophy in its central idea-" Man shall not live for himself alone"-it certainly places its ideal high; and in resulting conduct, has it altogether proved wanting?

No doubt this ideal finds its sanction in many doctrinal developments, but the ideal itself is common to them all. And it is with this ideal, with its com