perdition and really not worth the saving.[124] In the virtuous Pharisee and the pious Essene Judaism found its best representatives;[125] but at most there were only six thousand Pharisees[126] and four thousand Essenes[127] in all the nation, and, alas! the majority of the Pharisees were not sincere; and the Essenes, though really in earnest, had abandoned the nation to its fate. Among the religious classes piety and morality had become so dissociated that a man who in the matter of belief or of worship would strain at a gnat, might in practice without condemnation swallow a camel. The result of this fatal divorce between creed and conduct was seen in a social corruption which augured everywhere the gathering of the storm-clouds of retribution. At that time Greece was dead, and what was best in its spirit had passed into Alexandria. There, blending with the more robust spirit of the Hebrew religion, it was forming that Hellenism which, though it never could account for the origin, was yet powerfully to influence the unfolding of our religion. In Hellenism we have the natural resultant of the conflux of Eastern and Western thought, which, according to some, will explain the birth of Christianity. In it certainly the Aryan and the Semite were seen contributing their very best thoughts, and the product was—Philo; but Philo-Judæus is neither St. Paul nor St. John, and the Christ of the Gospels is further beyond him than the heavens are above the earth. In Alexandria Greece might be said to live, but Rome was hopelessly dying. Drunk with the cup of the sorceries of all nations, embruted with every lust, it was staggering to a doom which neither law, even the best conceived and most thoroughly administered, nor philosophy, even the wisest and most consistently illustrated, could avert. The civilisation of the Western world was marvellous: it was a world not only of poets and artists, of brave soldiers and subtle statesmen, but of sound moralists too; but civilisation, powerless to save, could only cover with broidered robes the leprous body, or adorn with golden trappings its bier, and morality could not restore what was sick unto death. When Rome and Palestine were alike corrupt, there was no hope for the world in man; yet when all help in man faileth, there never lacketh help in God, and so, just when the night was blackest, and despair had seized on all save a few aged people in the courts of Zion, and a few thoughtful Magi in the distant East, lo! over a Babe in the cattle-crib of a leewan in Bethlehem was descried the shining of the Star of Hope.