“_Let visions of the night or of the day Come, as they will; and many a time they come, Until this earth he walks on seems not earth, This light that strikes his eyeball is not light, This air that smites his forehead is not air But vision--yea, his very hand and foot--In moments when he feels he can not die, And knows himself no vision to himself, Nor the high God a vision, nor that One Who rose again._” It is very strange that a matter that has been in existence for almost two thousand years, that has already busied the minds and hearts of millions of teachers and writers, and that has been borne with great cost and exertions over seas and preached to nations to whom it was unknown, has become unfamiliar in its own place of dominion and among the most cultured nations of the globe. Or can we asseverate that the spirit, or, let us say, even the thought, of Christianity is something that is generally known and acknowledged in our European states? Far removed from this view, some within so-called Christendom, like the Roman procurator Festus, hold Christianity to be a sort of more or less harmless superstition concerning “one Jesus, who was dead, whom Paul affirmed to be alive”; others regard it as a society which it is the proper thing to belong to, without necessarily having any further interest in it; a third class looks upon it as a hierarchy of priests which, for reasons mostly external, they either reverence or abhor. To yet others it is a science called theology, to penetrate which there is need of very long courses of study and many examinations. And when they come to the particulars in the “structure of doctrine,” not many among the learned wholly agree as to what faith is, or mercy, or the significance of the “sacrifice of Christ,” whether there is predestination and eternal punishment, or a “restoration of all things,” or what are the methodical steps one must take, to be saved. Every one who ventures into these labyrinths of theological and philosophical thought, without at the same time possessing a very decided aspiration toward the highest truth and a very sound understanding of human nature, is apparently in danger of losing the one or the other. And so, thousands of the most cultured men of our day have, in fact, given up making any further trial of what seems to be joined with only trouble, contention, doubt, and renunciation of the natural enjoyments of life, only to lead, at the end, to nothing other than a kind of human slavery, without any better assurance than before. Christianity is now, for the greater part of Christians, a doctrine of the churches and the schools, which one listens to as long as one must, but from which a cultured man will inwardly free himself as quickly as possible, even if he still outwardly believes he must allow himself to fit into forms of the social life when once they have become historical.