of which the act ariseth, and to regenerate this nature so that it will hate what it believes to be wicked, and love what it believes to be holy. For Christ atoneth for all sin, and the act of faith is to personally appropriate the benefit thereof to each one for himself." "True," said Am-nem-hat, "and I undertake to assert that no other religion in the world hath so represented sin to be want of conformity to the will of God, rather than an evil deed; and in this whole matter of sin and the forgiveness thereof, thy religion differeth from paganism more radically than even in the doctrine of one God it differeth from polytheism." And in this and such like conversation the evening wore away until bed-time came, and they separated for the night. The family at Baucalis did not speak or think of these matters as of mere abstract theories of truth, or of philosophy, but as actual, living verities. The Christians felt their religion to be the only real life. They regarded all earthly pursuits, passions, and pleasures, as mere incidents of existence, and religion as the one controlling and all-important thing. Their pleasant home was to them a merely temporary station on the highway whereby they were journeying to a better land; the flesh was only a tabernacle which the spirit must soon forsake; all that pertained to it was for a brief season only; the real life was only begun during their occupancy of this earthly tenement; Christian faith was to them the one thing real and permanent, and earthly existence was of little consequence except as it might stand related to eternal interests. Hence there was a freshness, a vigor, a sense of reality and earnestness, in their way of thinking and speaking of such things, that demonstrated their religion to be no beautiful, speculative philosophy, but a hard, experimental, and all-controlling fact. And so every night during that week the dwellers at Baucalis assembled in Hatasa’s room, and passed long hours in the discussion of all the salient points of Christianity in a friendly, careful way, as if, indeed, they had a mutual interest in ascertaining the truth, especially concerning all those ideas upon which the antagonism between Christianity and paganism most plainly appeared. To set down all the various conversations in which they engaged would indeed be to write a treatise upon primitive Christianity, a work in which, perhaps, no interest would be felt in an age in which that system no longer exists upon earth, and is utterly unknown to all except a few self-poised, fearless, unpopular antiquarians, who have been eccentric and independent enough to exhume that ancient religion from out the accumulated _débris_ of fifteen centuries of ecclesiastical "progress" which flourisheth over its ruins even as the vine ripens and the roses bloom over the wreck of buried Pompeii. Yet we can not resist the inclination that moveth us to write out our notes of one other evening’s