But it may, on the contrary, transform and corrupt us. Without the aid of supernatural grace the influence of the world upon the Christian is demoralizing and destructive. Whatever is without God is equally without hope. Art, for instance, separated from its mission as an auxiliary to morals and religion and made independent, becomes artificial, and then degenerates into artifice. The world, instead of being lifted to a higher plane, drags the Christian to its own level. It is remarkable that Paul, whose facilities of observation were large and powers of perception keen, when writing to the Romans, the people of the eternal city, whose one dream and ambition in all her history had been power, commended the Gospel of Christ as “the power of God unto salvation;” but, when writing to Corinth, the busy center of commerce and merchandise, full of wealth, luxury, and corruption, he presented as the only influence which could correct these evils this profound truth: “Know ye not that ye are not your own? For ye are bought with a price: therefore glorify God.” There has not been a period since the days of John when the lesson which he wished to enforce in this vision of apostate and fallen Babylon was more important than now. Between the age of the apostles and the times in which we live a stronger resemblance exists than between any epochs in the annals of man. The rapid increase of means of transportation by which the ends of the earth are drawn together is effecting that state of things which the consolidation of the civilized world under the control of the Roman Empire produced. The boundaries between nations are being effaced; and their easy communication with each other makes possible an exceptional intermingling of languages, usages, moral codes, and religion. There is the same tendency toward the denial of all supernaturalism, on one side, and, at the opposite extreme, toward an eclecticism which concedes some truth to all forms of religion, while questioning the absolute truth of any, as that with which the apostolic Church was confronted. There is an excessive liberalism which, in its aversion to narrowness and under the plea of enlightened culture, would abandon all that specifically differentiates Christianity. But we will have read the records of the ante-Nicene period in vain if we have not learned from them that an imperfect Christianity, while it does not gain the world, does lose its own soul, and that the regeneration of mankind keeps exact pace with the measure of spirituality and purity which prevails in the Church of Christ.