power was ranged the force of national feelings which underlay the Roman authority throughout the whole empire. It had to deal entirely by moral means with the full liberty of error to which its adherents were exposed. Lastly, it had to do all this amid the continual strain of threatened or actual persecution, a state which at its best was one of insecurity, and which any local trouble, the ill-will of a mob, the greed or ambition or fear of provincial rulers, not to speak of the imperial state-policy, might turn into the pressure of severe suffering. In the face of such difficulties, if the Christian Church continued one in its doctrine, organisation, and manner of life, such unity was assuredly the proof of a divine power residing it. I shall now proceed to show by the testimony of eye-witnesses that such unity was its distinguishing characteristic. Now there was not a race or a religion in all this Roman empire, endless as the races and religions comprehended in it were, out of which individuals were not drawn into the bosom of the one great Christian society; and yet within this there was a perfect union of all hearts and minds in the conviction that the multitude so collected was one people apart from all other peoples. And this conviction is itself the great marvel. How was it wrought? For it was an utterly new thing upon the earth. The union of race, language, and locality, with which sameness of religion was usually interwoven, had been hitherto the bond of such nations as had as yet existed. The great city itself had sprung up and flourished by the strict union of these four things. After its career of foreign conquest had substituted for the government of a city the great Roman confederation, it had indeed, like the preceding world-empires, in fact disregarded all these, being supported by a force independent of them all. But that force was material power. The great statue was of iron. It was a novelty unheard of as yet among the gentiles and unimagined by poet or philosopher, to create a polity which, disregarding sameness of race, of language, and of locality, should exist and maintain itself throughout the whole earth solely by the force of faith and charity.