national and personal prejudices must have been overcome; how many rooted and inherent animosities must have been eradicated; how much stubborn pride must have been bent and mortified; and how many acute sensibilities deadened, before results such as these could have been obtained. And what was it all for? No earthly advantage had been or was likely to be secured. No hope of visible reward was offered. Simply the loss of self-respect, in having believed what was only a gross absurdity if it was not the truth, was incurred. The knowledge that under any circumstances their temporal condition would have been far better if they had never heard of Christ Jesus; that the belief in His name could give them neither lands nor houses, but only lay upon them additional hindrances in the way of gratifying their natural inclinations, only expose them more and more to the hatred and contempt of men. If in this life only they had hope in Christ, they were of all men most miserable; there was no one redeeming point, no one compensating advantage. They had believed a lie, and they were all the worse for it. These two points at least are clear: that they thought it no lie, and that under the circumstances they must have been strangely constituted, if, being a lie, it had the power to sustain them as it did. For observe, connected with the faith of Christ there was not even the gratification of flattered vanity in the case of these first believers. There is an intelligible pleasure that a man can find nowadays in constituting himself the apostle of unbelief. There is the promise of a certain intellectual glory in the effort to overthrow an ancient faith like that of Christianity. The hope of possible triumph is dazzling. There is a pleasure in seeming to be so much wiser than so many others, in having outstripped the accumulated wisdom of ages, in being the pioneer of intellectual emancipation, the harbinger of light that has emerged from every trace of religious darkness, the forerunner of the downfall of superstitious prejudices, the demolition of the last and oldest of the creeds. There is something to attract the imagination in all this, something to foster a self-complacent estimate of self, together with a kind of malevolent joy in indulging the passion of destructiveness. But what was there to flatter the vanity in the belief of a proclamation which was foolishness to the Greeks? What was there to exalt the intellect, or to magnify the self, in the doctrine of Christ crucified? We do not deny that it was possible for the self to enter in and mix even with the doctrine of the cross; but it could only do so as a principle that was fatally antagonistic to it. The two could not co-exist; one must destroy the other. The belief that a crucified malefactor had risen in triumph from the grave, was subversive of everything calculated to honour the intellect, or to please the natural desire of man to worship and admire himself. There was no harvest to be