philosophy, not as a code of morality, but as an actual fact the fact of the person Christ Jesus. All depends on Him. With Him, Christianity stands or falls. It cannot be separated from Him. It was not His precepts, but His person and His testimony concerning himself, which brought about the crisis in Israel. He himself made His whole cause depend upon His person. We cannot separate it from Him. Rationalism has attempted to separate Christianity from Christ, and to reduce it to mere morality. But experience has proved the attempt impossible. Jesus Christ does not bear the same relation to Christianity as Mohammed does to Mohammedanism, or as any other founder of a religion to the religion he has founded; but He is himself Christianity. To speak of Christianity, is to speak, not of doctrines and precepts, but of Jesus Christ. Christianity is indeed a summary of truths, a new doctrine, a philosophy if you will, a new view of the world, a new explanation of history, a new mode of worship, a new morality, a new rule of life, etc. It is all these, because it is a fact universal in its nature. But all these depend upon the person of Jesus Christ, are given with Him, and included in Him-stand and fall with Him. If we, therefore, turn our attention to the position and significance of Christianity in history, it is the historical position and significance of Jesus Christ himself which meets our view. To this subject we shall next address ourselves.

LECTURE IX.

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CHRISTIANITY IN HISTORY.

HEY are a few apparently unimportant words with which the evangelist St Luke opens

his narrative of the birth of Jesus, when he says (Luke ii. 1), that in those days there went out a decree from Cæsar Augustus that all the world should be taxed, and proceeds to relate that this taxing took place at the time when Jesus was, in conformity with prophecy, born in Bethlehem, the ancient home of the house of David;-they are, I say, few and apparently unimportant words, and yet they designate in a characteristic manner the whole historical position. For these two circumstances are included in them: the coincidence of the appearance of Jesus in history with the culmination and close of the ancient times, as exhibited in the Roman emperor; and the subordination of the course of the world's history to the progress of the sacred history, together with their consequent intrinsic connexion.

The age then existing was itself conscious of its approaching end. The Roman empire was not an accident, but the necessary result of preceding history.

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We may perhaps say, that every Roman general who ascended the Capitol in a triumph, surrounded by the applauding soldiers and populace, was a type of the emperor, who was not after a short enjoyment of official dignity to abdicate the supreme power to another, but to make it permanent. And those several possessors of power, such as a Pompey, an Antony, a Cæsar, who, in the midst of the stormy excitement of their times, raised themselves above their fellow citizens, what were they but preliminary approximations to him who was to establish the future imperial power, and make it a permanent possession of his family? The republic of so many centuries would not so willingly have surrendered itself to the new imperator if the empire had not been the mature fruit of the whole previous growth, and a necessity of preceding history. In it the Roman universal empire found its close, and the fulfilment of its vocation.

There was an ancient prophecy in Israel—found in the book of Daniel (chap. ii. 29-42, and vii.)—of the succession of the various universal empires, with whose climax the kingdom of the Son of man and of His saints was to coincide.

Consciousness of the mutual connexion of all men on the one hand, and the instinct of dominion on the other, had early given rise to the idea of uniting all the various nations and kingdoms of the world into one great empire, which was to include the whole earth. To that resolute Babylonian monarch, Nebuchadnezzar, may this proud and magnificent notion

be in the first instance referred, a notion so much the grander, the further removed foreign states and nations were from the circle of vision. And there was a truth in the notion; for there is in the soul of man a consciousness of mutual connection with the whole race, and we cannot conceive the end to which all the events of history are tending to be any other than the union of mankind into one great family. The present phase of history, indeed, is that of nationalities, but cosmopolitanism is its future. We may even say that this notion is God's own thought concerning mankind; for this is the end towards which all his ways are tending. As far, however, as the manner in which it was conceived and the means by which its realization was sought by those powerful rulers of Asia were concerned, it was a depredation committed upon truth; for it was undertaken in the service of an ambitious thirst of power, and was thus a mere caricature of the divine thought. But, once introduced into the course of human affairs, this thought had its history in the gradual progress of its realization. The idea of universal empire formed, from that time forth, the motive power of history. Often, as one attempt after another at its realisation failed, it was nevertheless ever taken up again, with the view of attaining by the use of new means what the former had failed to ensure. Four great attempts at realizing this idea had special prominence in history-the Babylonian, Persian, Grecian, and Roman monarchies. The memories of these empires are com

bined respectively with the names of Nebuchadnezzar, Cyrus, Alexander, and Cæsar. The two first are closely connected with the history of Israel, the two last with the entrance of Christianity into the world.

It was Nebuchadnezzar who, by leading Israel into captivity to Babylon, dissolved their state, and thus executed the long threatened judgment of God upon that disobedient people, Cyrus, on the contrary, by his permission to the Israelites to return and to rebuild their temple, restored to their commonwealth the form, though a mean one, in which it was to experience and receive the fulfilment of its ancient hopes, and the blessing of true redemption. The contact of the people of the promise with Gentile nations, had in both instances served to transplant even into heathen soil the peculiar truths of their religious knowledge and hope, and so to fulfil, with respect to the heathen, that prophetic office which the chosen people had to all the nations of the world, and thereby to prepare the heathen world for the fulfilment of the promise.

The two other monarchies-the Grecian under Alexander, and the Roman of the emperors-stand in close relation to the entrance of Christianity into the world. It was the grand idea of Alexander to establish the extensive empire which he had so hastily won in his stormy attack upon the ancient bulwark of the Asiatic countries,—an empire extending from the mountains of Macedonia to the rivers of India, and composed of nations so widely differing from each