If we embrace in one view the three constituents on which we have touched—belief, worship, and government—and contemplate the Christian people which is its outcome, how total a contrast does it present in the Christian habit of life to that of the heathen. The Christian worships a single God, who by the greatest of mysteries is at once one and three; who has a triple personality; he partakes of a worship in which that God, offered first as a Victim for him, becomes his Food; he is governed by one who bears the person of that God, whose priesthood is the foundation of his rule, and whose teaching is bound up with both rule and worship. That which the heathen called nature was to the Christian the ever-living operation of a creative hand hiding under shapes which met the senses an illimitable power, wisdom, and goodness; and the majesty of the God whom he thus adored was presented to him in the holiest rite of his worship as the Victim who redeemed him, and the Food which nourished his spiritual life. Greek and Egyptian, Syrian and African, Roman and barbarian, it was difficult to say from which he was most removed in all his thoughts of God and man, and the world around. But to the whole body of people thus created it was the shifting of the basis on which the heathen State rested, because it was the discovery of the one Lord from whom all rule descended, and in whose name it was administered. The Roman ruled not in virtue of the principle that one God had made all the nations of the earth of one blood, and partitioned the kingdoms of the earth among them, but by virtue of the fact that the children of the wolf-cub had been the strongest in fight and the firmest in discipline, and had reduced a hundred peoples beneath their sway. The Roman himself worshipped and protected in others the worship of ancestral, that is, national gods, and the God of the Christians claimed not to be national, and to dethrone them all. The Roman, and the nations he held in subjection, believed in a multitude of traditionary doctrines respecting the earth and its inhabitants, and the powers presiding over them, some true and some false, mixed up in each case with peculiar and national interests, and all these the Christian swept away in the sublime belief, austere at once and tender, of a single Being who created, sustained, and ruled all, with the love of a Creator for all, while He kept watch over every thought, word, and action of every rational creature; that is, who was Judge and Rewarder, as well as Creator. And, lastly, this new Christian people held as the very bond of its existence that being the Body of Christ, it was to embrace all nations, and be co-extensive with the earth, co-enduring with man's race.