solemnly calls upon men to renounce the dearly-cherished errors, and to trample under foot the warmly-worshipped idols of a whole people. “_If it be lawful in the sight of God to hearken unto men rather than unto God, judge ye!_” This is what Peter said, speaking the truth boldly, in the face of roaring multitudes, frowning dignitaries, and lines of bristling lances. A religion in which such rare manhood was as common as cowardice is common in general society, if it was not crushed in the bud, as Protestantism was in Bohemia, could not but grow up to a mighty tree in the end. The stoical death of the gladiators in the Colosseum was wont to draw admiration, and sometimes even to extort pity, from the spectators; but their death was compulsory, and the stoicism of their last moments only a theatrical grace to fall decently before an applauding multitude. The Christian, on the other hand, whether as a fearless preacher or as an unflinching martyr, made a voluntary protest, and chose a self-imposed torture. If he was not a fool or a madman, he was a hero; and the heroism he displayed was of such a high order, that being repeated only for a generation or two, it caused the combined force of popular prejudice and traditional authority in the heathen world to blush itself into a {220} not unwilling subjection. So much of lofty courage and of genuine manhood did subtle Greece and powerful Rome learn from the moral missionaries of poor and despised Palestine! Let us now cast a glance on that most characteristic and most widely bruited of all the Christian virtues, viz., LOVE; which under the name of Charity (not Ἔρως, the old satellite of Venus, but ἀγάπη), St. Paul in a famous chapter eulogizes as at once the crown and the epitome of all virtues most peculiarly Christian. We read also that “Love is the fulfilling of the law;” and a watchword so deliberately chosen and so emphatically sounded must always be pregnant with significance as to the moral character and efficiency of the religion to which it belongs. Now the plain significance which this blazon bears on the face of it is this, that if Love be the blossom of all virtue, the root of all vice is the opposite of Love, viz., Selfishness. And whosoever has looked into the moral world with any faculty of generalizing, will not fail to have observed that every form of vice is only a diverse manifestation of that untempered, voracious, and altogether monstrous egotism, which, in order to purchase for itself a slight advantage or a momentary titillation, would not scruple to plunge a whole universe into disorder and ruin; while, on the other hand, the virtuous man lives as much by sympathy with the desires of others as by the gratification of his own, and is ready at any moment to dash the bowl of blessedness from his lips, if he must purchase it by the consignment to misery of a singly human soul. And if we look at the lower organism of society,