faiths, its boast of antiquity, its claim to a monopoly of the future of the race, exerted a weird spell over the dazed and decrepit minds of the superstitious, high and low. Its lofty belief in miracle and sign, fairly constrained the skeptical to bow the head. The interest felt in Judaism, and its influence on society in its high places, have already been alluded to, and need not be further insisted on. The testimony of Juvenal--the testimony of sarcasm and complaint--is enough to establish the fact that a curiosity amounting to infatuation had taken possession especially of the women of Rome. If it be asked why Judaism, then, was not made the religion of the empire, instead of Christianity, which it hated with all the fervor of close relationship, the answer is at hand: _Judaism laid no emphasis on its cosmopolitan features, and discouraged belief in the historical fulfilment of its own prophecy_. The charge that it was a _national_ religion, the religion of a race, it was at no pains to repel; on the contrary, it seems to have exaggerated this claim to distinction, standing on its dignity, despising the arts of propagandism and demanding the submission of other creeds. This attitude alone might have recommended the religion in some quarters, and would not have seriously embarrassed it in any, supposing it to have been loftily and worthily sustained. A graver cause of its unpopularity was its failure to lay stress on its Messianic idea. It would abate nothing of its monotheistic grandeur. Its God was the everlasting, the infinite, the formless, the invisible. The command to make of Him no image whatever, either animal or human, to associate Him with neither place nor time, was obeyed to the letter. Among a people extremely sensitive to grace of form and beauty of color, the Jews had no art; they set up no statue; they painted no picture; they allowed no emblem that could be worshipped. Their Holy Spirit was an influence; their Messiah was a distant hope; their kingdom of heaven was a dream. The Christians of both schools--the conservative and the liberal--thrust into the foreground the conceptions which their co-religionists kept in the shadow of anticipation. In their belief, prophecy was fulfilled. The Messiah had come; he had taken on human shape; he had passed through an earthly career; he had ascended in visible form to the skies; he sat there at the right hand of the Majesty on high; he was active in his care for his own, suffering and sorrowing on earth; he sent the Holy Spirit, the comforter and guide to his friends in their affliction; he was the immediate God; he heard and answered prayer; he pardoned sin; he opened the gates of heaven to believers. They did not scruple to make images of him; to represent him in emblems; to eke out their own rude art by adopting the art which the heathen had ceased to venerate, and, where they could, re-dedicating statues of Apollo and Jupiter to their Christ. They were eager to have