The predominant notes of the New Testament are tenderness and ardor, but inwrought with these is a vein of terror and sometimes of fierce wrath. It is like the denunciation in the Old Testament, to which the vision of a future world has added a more lurid hue. "Asia's rancor" has not disappeared, even in the presence of "Bethlehem's heart." Among the words attributed to Jesus are the threat of that perdition where the worm dieth not and the fire is not quenched. To him is ascribed (whether truly or not) the story of Dives in hell, and father Abraham in whose bosom Lazarus is reposing denies even his prayer for a drop of water to cool his tongue. Here is the germ of all the horrors of the mediaeval imagination. The germs bore an early fruitage in that book which bears the name of "Revelation." It mirrors the passions which spring up amid the heats of faction and of persecution. Fell hatred fills its pages for the persecutor and for the heretic. The few gleams of Paradise for the saved are pale in comparison with the ghastly terrors. It is the first full outbreak of that disease of the imagination, bred of disease of the heart, which was to be the curse of Christianity. We have dwelt upon the central facts and ideas in which Christianity took its rise. We shall pass with a few brief glances over a tract of many centuries. Our special concern in this work is with the birth-periods of the vital and lasting principles of man's higher life. One such phase was the Greek-Roman philosophy of which the best outcome was Stoicism. Another critical era was the birth of Christianity from its immediate lineage of Judaism. The next great epoch is the marriage of rational knowledge with the spiritual life--which is the story of these last centuries, in mid-action of which we are standing. Viewing man's higher life upon its intellectual side, the common characteristic of the period between the time of the Apostles and our immediate forefathers is the prevalence of what may be called the Christian mythology. In other words, the moral rules and spiritual ideals were almost inextricably bound up with and based upon the conception of a supernatural world, certainly and definitely known, and disclosed to mankind through a series of revelations which centred in the incarnation of God in the man Jesus Christ. Upon this basis was reared a vast intellectual and imaginative structure--embodied in many creeds, pictured in visions of Dante and Milton and Bunyan, enforced by multitudinous appeals to emotion and reason, to love, hope, and terror.