the rest of the Roman world under the Caesars feel that they had no country, and was the idea of patriotism extinct in the age of Agricola? But surely the real question worth asking is, What was it amid the increasing civilisation and prosperous peace of Rome under the first Emperors which made these Christians relinquish the idea of a country? From whence did Christianity draw its power to set its followers in inflexible opposition to the intensest worship of the State that the world has ever known? To tell us the conditions under which all this occurred is not to tell us the cause of it. We follow with interest the sketches which M. Renan gives of these conditions, though it must be said that his generalisations are often extravagantly loose and misleading. We do indeed want to know more of those wonderful but hidden days which intervene between the great Advent, with its subsequent Apostolic age, and the days when the Church appears fully constituted and recognised. German research and French intelligence and constructiveness have done something to help us, but not much. But at the end of all such inquiries appears the question of questions, What was the beginning and root of it all? Christians have a reasonable answer to the question. There is none, there is not really the suggestion of one, in M. Renan's account of the connection of Christianity with the Roman world. II[16] [16] _Guardian_, 21st April 1880. M. Renan has pursued the line of thought indicated in his first lecture, and in his succeeding lectures has developed the idea that Christianity, as we know it, was born in Imperial Rome, and that in its visible form and active influence on the world it was the manifest product of Roman instincts and habits; it was the spirit of the Empire passing into a new body and accepting in exchange for political power, as it slowly decayed and vanished, a spiritual supremacy as unrivalled and as astonishing. The "Legend of the Roman Church--Peter and Paul," "Rome the Centre in which Church Authority grew up," and "Rome the Capital of Catholicism," are the titles of the three lectures in which this thesis is explained and illustrated. A lecture on Marcus Aurelius, at the Royal Institution, though not one of the series, is obviously connected with it, and concludes M. Renan's work in England.