fraction of that people, and to the purest form of that religion, to whom and to which we owe Christianity itself; in other words, it is to believers in the God of the Jews and of the Christians, and not to the believers in any pagan gods or in no God, we are indebted for the first authoritative interference with the pretended right of man to hold his fellow-man in bondage. The other is, that the Essenes must have purposely avoided propagandism and proselytism, kept themselves few and select, and courted retirement and obscurity, in order to escape persecution and perhaps death at the hands of their Jewish brethren. Upon no other supposition would it be easy to account for their fewness and impunity. For everything recorded of them goes to show that they were as singular a people amongst the Jews, as the Jews themselves were singular to the rest of the world; and those who did not spare Christ and his Apostles were not likely to have spared them, had they been equally bold and zealous in the propagation of their principles. It was, probably, from similar motives that they mixed up celibacy and other asceticisms and eccentricities with their system. What was singular and unpopular was not likely to alarm rulers, or to excite a dread of innovation, because not likely to excite imitation and to attract followers; and what the authorities or the ruling classes saw no cause to dread, they would not be forward to prosecute or persecute. The apparent absurdities and vagaries of many other levelling sects might probably be accounted for in a similar way. Had the Mormons mixed up celibacy and other repulsive asceticisms and absurdities with their politico-religious system, like the Shakers and White Quakers, it is not improbable that they would be still under the patriarchal care of Joe Smith at Nauvoo. This fact alone speaks volumes for the dangers and difficulties Christianity had to encounter a few years later, when, for the first time in the history of the human race, a few fishermen and other obscure persons, headed by the supposed son of a carpenter, proclaimed open warfare against all that, up to that time, had been held sacred and indestructible in the constitution of human society. And what pen, what tongue, can describe the zeal, the labour, the sacrifices, the dangers, the trials, the persecutions, of the early Christians in their first onslaught upon the powers of might and darkness? Never, never, can a tithe of a tithe of what they achieved and suffered in the cause of human redemption be known to their Christian successors of our day. It is only the profound politician, conversant with men and with the world, as well as versed in the history of his own and other times, who can even imagine what they must have suffered, or approximate to appreciating the miraculous virtues they must have displayed, and the herculean labours they must have performed.