afflicting poor women and innocent children? Who first made a public provision to meet these evils?--Constantine it was, the first Christian that sat upon a throne. Had, then, rich Pagans before his time no charity--no pity?--no money available for hopeless poverty? Not much--very little, I conceive; about so much as Shakspeare insinuates that there is of milk in a male tiger. Think, for instance, of that black-hearted reprobate, Cicero, the moralist. This moral knave, who wrote such beautiful Ethics, and _was_ so wicked--who spoke so charmingly and acted so horribly--mentions, with a petrifying coolness, that he knew of desolate old women in Rome who passed three days in succession without tasting food. Did not the wretch, when thinking of this, leap up, and tumble down stairs in his anxiety to rush abroad and call a public meeting for considering so dreadful a case? Not he; the man continued to strut about his library, in a huge toga as big as the _Times_ newspaper, singing out, '_Oh! fortunatam natam me Consule Romam!_' and he mentioned the fact at all only for the sake of Natural Philosophers or of the curious in old women. Charity, even in that sense, had little existence--nay, as a duty, it had no place or rubric in human conceptions before Christianity, Thence came the first rudiments of all public relief to starving men and women; but the idea, the principle, was all that the Bible furnished, needed to furnish, or could furnish. The practical arrangements, the endless details for carrying out this Christian idea--these were furnished by man; and why not? This case illustrates only one amongst innumerable modes of development applicable to the Bible; and this power of development, in general, proves also one other thing of the last importance to prove, viz. the power of Christianity to work in co-operation with time and social progress; to work variably according to the endless variations of time and place; and _that_ is the exact _shibboleth_ of a true and spiritual religion--for, on reviewing the history of false religions, and inquiring what it was that ruined them, rarely is it found that any of them perished by external violence. Even the dreadful fury of the early Mahometan Sultans in India, before the house of Timour, failed to crush the monstrous idolatries of the Hindoos. All false religions have perished by their own hollowness, under that searching trial applied by social life and its changes, which awaits every mode of religion. One after another they have sunk away, as by palsy, from new aspects of society and new necessities of man which they were not able to face. Commencing in one condition of society, in one set of feelings, and in one system of ideas, they sank uniformly under any great change in these elements, to which they had no natural power of accommodation. A false religion furnished a key to one subordinate lock; but a religion that is true will prove a master-key for all locks alike. This transcendental