God, in order to redeem man, had to take on sinful flesh and be himself the curse in order to be the cure. Hence we read in the _Teaching of the Twelve Apostles_, chap. xvi., that "they who endure in their faith shall be saved by the very curse." Thus may we understand that which modern Christians find so difficult of explanation, viz., that the whole Christian world for the first thousand years from St. Justin to St. Anselm believed that Christ paid the ransom for sinners to the Devil, their natural owner. Christ in order to become the Savior had to become the curse, had to die and had to descend to hell, though of course, being God, he could not stay there. Hence his being likened to the brazen serpent, that remnant of early Jewish fetichism which was smashed by Hezekiah (2 Kings xviii. 4). John makes Jesus himself teach that "as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness [as a cure for serpent bites] even so must the Son of man be lifted up, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish but have eternal life." So Irenæus says (bk. iv., chap. 2), "men can be saved in no other way from the old wound of the serpent than by believing in him, who in the likeness of sinful flesh, is lifted up from the earth on the tree of martyrdom, and draws all things to himself and vivified the dead." That is, Christ was made sinful flesh to be the curse itself, just as the innocent brass appeared a serpent, because the form of the curse was necessary to the cure. Paul dwells on the passage of the law "Cursed is he that hangeth on a tree," with the very object of showing that Christ, cursed under the law, was a blessing under his glad tidings. The Fathers were never tired of saying that man was lost by a tree (in Eden) and saved by a tree (on Calvary), that as the curse came in child-birth* and thorns, so the world was saved by the birth of Christ and his crown of thorns. Justin says, "As the curse came by a Virgin, so by a Virgin the salvation," and this antithesis between Eve and Mary has been carried on by Catholic writers down to our own day. * Notice too 1 Tim. 15, where women are said to be saved by child birth, their curse. As the Christian doctrine of salvation through the blood of Christ has certainly no more foundation in fact than the efficacy of liver-wort in liver diseases, we suggest it may have no better foundation than the ancient superstition of salvation by similars. RELIGION AND MAGIC.