There is often a vague assumption that certain principles of natural right, evolved and compacted by ethical science, might save our social state. But, remember that society, without Christ, in its philosophy, its literature, its art, its morals, obeyed a law of deterioration and decay. Without him, it would have been sinking still. Instead of the Christian justice that hangs its balances over our seats of lawful trade to-day, we should have not even Punic faith; but something more treacherous than that—not even the hesitating Roman honesty, but a zone of restraint more dissolute than the Corinthian, and principles looser than the Spartan’s. Instead of a respected merchant, or a steady mechanic, going out to his business to-morrow, amid a public order that Christ has organized, might have been seen a barbarian, with the concentrated falsity of a hundred Arabs, waking into a world convulsed with perpetual anarchy, or skulking away to transact his base affairs in a worse than Circassian mart. We may baptize the interesting displays of our intermittent virtue with a Christian name; but they may yet contain no quality of Christ’s peculiar sanctity. They may leave human life quite untouched by that unrivaled glory, however bright their transient beam. They are not redolent of the New Testament. Their uprightness does not bear the sanction of the Sermon on the Mount. Their slender rectitude is not the principle that treats men justly because they are God’s children, which was the law of Christ’s great honesty. Their kindness is not the sweet charity of the beatitudes. Their moderation is not guarded by those majestic warders, reverence for God, and a Savior’s love. Nor is their worship, if they adore at all, fervent with the prayers of Olivet and Gethsemane. And as the first dispensation ended in a slavery in Egypt, or broods darkly over pagan nations waiting to be brought nigh by the blood of Christ to this hour, so the lawless motions of every self-guided will end in a servitude to some Pharaoh in the members that cries aloud for emancipation—a settled alienation from the household of the good. [_March 18._] THREE DISPENSATIONS. Next after this impulsive or spontaneous period, which is the period of childhood, comes the legal or judicial—a second stage in the history of the religious consciousness. Moses, the law-giver, is its representative. From this crisis, the chief significance of the world’s religious experience is concentrated, for some sixteen hundred years, in Judea, and human progress runs on through the channel of Hebrew nationality. Other families have wandered off into hopeless idolatries. The religion of instinct has found its appropriate termination in a degraded Egyptian priesthood, mixing civil despotism with the incantations of an impure mythology.