she will ever have to defend herself, she has before her, over the whole face of the world, a future immense and full of promise. This she owes to her origin--she was born in the manger of Jesus. {206} There is at present a disposition amongst earnest and enlightened men to recognise, it is true, the services which Christianity has rendered to the world; but to attribute them only to the morality of Christianity. They laud to the sky the moral character of Jesus, and his moral precepts; but they repudiate, nay, deplore, the dogmas with which, in the Christian faith, Christian morality is combined and incorporated; they demand that the morality be separated from it, and be presented to man without anything but its intellectual beauty and practical excellence. Although not disputing that there is somewhat of human in the origin and empire of morality, I have established in this volume of Meditations that it is necessarily allied to religious belief, and that when separated from its divine source, and viewed apart from that which gives it sanction, it is incomplete, illogical, and powerless--a branch without root and without fruit. {207} I go farther now, and express my meaning fully. Not only is Christian morality intimately connected with Christian faith, as the Christian faith is itself connected with Christian dogmas, but Christian morals, Christian faith, and Christian dogmas have taken their origin, and derived their force, at a source still higher, and in an authority still more decisive. Christianity did not begin, it did not rise upon the world, as one body of doctrines or code of precepts; from its first step it was a truth, strange to the ordinary course of human affairs, and superior to them; a fact divine, and an act divine; it was as such, and by its character as such, that, sometimes all at once, and sometimes gradually, it struck men as by a blow and vanquished them, at first the rude and simple, then the great and learned, publicans and emperors, the disciples of Plato, and the fishermen of the sea of Gennesareth. {208} At different moments, and for different motives, all of them saw in the cradle, and the rapid extent of infant Christianity, a sublime and superhuman fact, a God present and acting in and by Jesus. Some recognised and adored him at the very moment of his appearing; others observed him with troubled and angry feelings; but, in proportion as the truth developed itself, even those who detested him doubted if they were right in doubting. The council and all the senate of the children of Israel had caused Peter and the other apostles to be placed in prison, and took counsel to have them put to death. "Then stood there up one in the council, a Pharisee, named Gamaliel, a doctor of the law, had in reputation among all the people, and commanded to put the apostles forth a little space; and said unto them: Ye men of Israel, take heed to yourselves what ye intend to do as touching these men.