The importance ascribed to Christianity as a special moral force working in the constitution of the heathen world, is, by recent admission, acknowledged to have been much exaggerated. The chapter on "The state of the world toward the middle of the first century" in Renan's "Apostles," sums up with singular calmness, clearness and easy strength, the influences that were slowly transforming the social condition of the empire; the nobler ideas, the purer morals, the amenities and humanities that were stealing in to temper the violence, mitigate the ferocity, soften the hardness and uplift the grossness of the western world. Samuel Johnson's little essay on "The Worship of Jesus" is a subtle glance into the same facts, tracing the efficacy of powers that co-operated in producing the atmospheric change which was as summer succeeding winter over the civilized earth. Mr. Lecky, with broader touch, but accurately and conscientiously, paints a noble picture on the same subject. But other artists, of a different school, make the same representation. Merivale, lecturing in 1864, on the Boyle foundation, in the Chapel Royal, at Whitehall, on the "Conversion of the Roman Empire," in the interest of the christian Church, says, "the influence of Grecian conquest was eminently soothing and civilizing; it diffused ideas of humanity and moral culture, while the conquerors themselves imbibed on their side the highest of moral lessons, lessons of liberality, of toleration, of sympathy with all God's human creation." "Plutarch, in a few rapid touches, enforced by a vivid illustration which we may pass over, gives the picture of the new humane polity, the new idea of human society flashed upon the imagination of mankind by the establishment of the Macedonian Empire. Such, at least, it appeared to the mind of a writer five centuries later; but there are traces preserved, even in the wrecks of ancient civilization, of the moral effect which it actually produced on the feelings of society, much more nearly contemporaneous. The conqueror, indeed, perished early, but not prematurely. The great empire was split into fragments, but each long preserved a sense of the unity from which it was broken off. All were leavened more or less with a common idea of civilization, and recognized man as one being in various stages of development, to be trained under one guidance and elevated to one spiritual level. In the two great kingdoms of Egypt and Syria, which sprang out of the Macedonian,--in the two great cities of Alexandria and Antioch, to which the true religion owes so deep a debt,--the unity of the human race was practically asserted and maintained." "After three centuries of national amalgamation, the result of a widespread political revolution, after the diffusion of Grecian ideas among every people, from the Ionian to the Caspian or the Red Sea, and the reception in return, of manifold ideas, and in religious matters of much higher ideas, from the Persian, the