morals, great personages, and great influences, made no mention in any of his books of Christ or Christianity. ("If we place his birth," says Archbishop Trench, "at about the year A. D. 50, then long before he began to write, St. Peter and St. Paul must have finished their course. All around him--at Rome, where he dwelt so long; in that Greece where the best part of his life was spent; in Asia Minor, with which Greece was in constant communication; in Macedonia--there were flourishing churches. Christianity was everywhere in the air, so that men unconsciously inhaled some of its influences, even where they did not submit themselves to its positive teaching. But for all this, no word, no allusion of Plutarch's, testifies to his knowledge of the existence of these churches, or to the slightest acquaintance on his part with the Christian books." Suetonius, a contemporary of Plutarch, calls the Christians "a sort of people who held a new and impious superstition." Pliny, another contemporary, pronounces the Christian religion "a depraved, wicked, and outrageous superstition;" Tacitus, "a foreign and deadly superstition.") That John Stuart Mill, who found time and space in his autobiography to make careful lists of the incredible number of books he read between the ages of three and fourteen, to note the languages and sciences he acquired in the same time, as well as his associations and relations with his father, his brothers, and his sisters; who accepted his wife, during her life-time, as his divinity, and, after her death, confessed her memory to have been his religion,--omitted to say one word about his mother. That Jonathan Edwards, the great theologian and thinker,--in the opinion of Robert Hall, "the greatest of the sons of men,"--never had the degree of doctor of divinity or doctor of laws conferred on him, while they were showered on scores of his commonplace contemporaries. That Sir John Suckling and Richard Lovelace, so famous as courtiers and poet cavaliers, the pets of the king and the people, the much admired and adored by the female sex, died in wretchedness and despair,--the former taking poison, and the latter dying in rags in a miserable alley in London. That Milton, advanced in years, blind, and in misfortune, entered upon the composition of his immortal epic, achieving it in six years. That Scott, also advanced in years, his private affairs in ruin, undertook to liquidate, by intellectual labors alone, a debt of more than half a million of dollars, nearly accomplishing it in the same time. That Dr. Lardner published a treatise to prove that a steamboat could never cross the Atlantic (the steamship Sirius, which crossed soon after, carrying over his pamphlet), and staked his reputation as a man of science to a committee of the House of Commons that no railway train could ever be propelled faster than ten miles in an hour, as the slightest curve would infallibly throw it off the rails. That Babinet, the French calculator,