It is a topic in universal history. The Christian era succeeds by a close historical connection to the period which preceded it, and that period was the outcome of the ages going before. These preceding ages appear to us historically under a merely natural aspect. That is to say, the nations of the earth have no divine revelation or religion. Their religions are different and national, mere human creations, and their polity, morals, philosophy, and literature are products of natural intelligence. Their early history loses itself in obscurity or fable. Hence the manifest connection of the Christian period with the ages foregoing gives some plausible ground for the hypothesis that the origin of Christianity is natural, that it is only an outcome of mere natural progress and development. When we proceed to show a preparation for Christianity in the ages immediately preceding, we may be asked if we do not thereby tacitly admit and argue from this hypothesis. If God created all mankind for a supernatural destiny, under a supernatural providence; needing a divine revelation, in which a divine religion, one, unchangeable, demanding absolute, universal faith and obedience, is made known and imposed on the intellect and will of man as obligatory; how is it that we seek for the causes and events which prepared the way for its promulgation in a previous state of things so unlike that which we declare God intended to produce by Christianity? The answer to this is easy. God began by giving a revelation and a divine religion to all mankind. The general falling away from this primitive religion was not so far advanced as to make it necessary for God to select a special race as the recipient and preserver of a renewed form of the divine religion until two thousand years before Christ. The period of the old and universal form of religion, therefore, embraces all the time from the calling of Abraham to the creation of man, at least two thousand years, and, according to the opinion of many, from two thousand five hundred to four thousand years. During the entire period of human history, therefore, from the creation of man to the present moment, embracing from sixty to eighty centuries, the divine religion derived from revelation has been more or less universally promulgated, with the exception of its mediæval portion—that is, during a time including from two-thirds to three-fourths of the whole time in which the human race has existed. The period in which the mass of mankind was left to itself apparently, without the law of God manifested by revelation—the period called by St. Paul “the time of ignorance which God winked at”—embraces only the remaining third or fourth part of time, that is, twenty centuries. This state of ignorance was not original, and not natural in the sense of being conformed to the exigencies of human nature and human destiny, or intended and directly produced by the Author of nature. It was the result of an apostasy, a degeneration, a