A kind Providence gave Alexander the victory. The insurgents were driven back to their camp. Still they were too powerful to be punished. The whole reign of Severus was harassed and imbittered by the outrages of this licentious soldiery. We have now come down in our narrative to the middle of the third century. The Romans were a very powerful, and in many respects a highly-cultivated people. Their literature has excited the admiration of the world. It is still studied in the highest seats of learning. Their paganism was the best which the world has ever known. We have presented in impartial contrast the practical workings of the religion of Rome and the religion of Jesus Christ. Every thoughtful reader must be impressed with the wonderful, the divine superiority of Christianity. It must be manifest to every reflective mind, that, in the religion of Jesus Christ, we find the only hope for our lost world. That religion is not a religion of dead doctrines and pompous ceremonies, but one of a living faith and a holy life. “Do right,” says Christianity,――“right to God by loving him and worshipping him as your heavenly Father; right to yourself by cultivating in your own heart every thing that is pure, lovely, and of good report; right to your fellow-man, regarding him as your brother, and doing every thing in your power to elevate him, purify him, and prepare him for heaven. Your past sins may all be forgiven. Christ has died upon the cross, and made atonement for them. Penitence for sin, trust in an atoning Saviour, and the earnest, prayerful return to a holy life, will open to you the gates of heaven.” This is Christianity. It needs not the enforcement of labored argument: it is its own best witness. “He that believeth on the Son of God hath the witness in himself.”[173] It not unfrequently happens that a young man gets the impression that there is something a little distinguished in being an unbeliever. He assumes the air of a sceptic, and takes the ground that Christianity is the religion of weak minds; that the reason why he does not believe is, that he has more intelligence and knowledge than those people who believe. Should there chance to be such a one who reads these pages, I would ask him, How do you account for the fact that the most intelligent men in the world have been Christians? Were Bacon and Boyle, Sir Matthew Hale and Herschel, men whose intellectual renown has filled centuries, weak-minded men?――and yet they were Christians. Was Napoleon Bonaparte a man of feeble intellect?――yet he said at St. Helena,――