retributive justice opened the way for the immediate incarnation of infinite Love. The capture of Jerusalem by Titus, was the beginning of the consummation. A false Messiah was proclaimed to a people already morally ruined, and the frenzied insurrection under Barchochebas, A.D. 132, closed the existence of Judah. Hadrian completed the terrible work. He built a theatre with the stones of the Temple, dedicated a temple to Jupiter on the spot where the altar of God had stood, placed the image of a swine on the city gates, and thenceforth excluded the Jews from their beloved metropolis. At that moment the church chose their chief presbyter from the Gentiles, instead of the race of Abraham, as was the custom before, and thus the bridge between Judaism and Christianity was forever broken down. But the Roman empire was now, in turn, to perish. One of the high ends for which it was permitted, had been fulfilled in the extirpation of Judah, and its own final use was the diffusion of a diviner system. The tokens of coming doom multiplied from the hour the arch of Titus was completed. Leviathan still dashed the political ocean into foam, but the ebb was inevitably come, and he must soon be laid dry upon the shore. Let us briefly review the facts. Tradition assigns to Numa, a Sabine, the establishment of the laws and regulations of the Roman polity, both civil and religious; but in the absence of authentic records, it is difficult to say how far the statements respecting this regal law-giver are to be relied upon. The spirit of the Roman religion was originally quite different from that of the Grecian. The former was plastically flexible, the latter sacerdotally immutable. After the bloody proscriptions and civil wars of preceding centuries, Octavius, under the name of Augustus, appeared as the restorer of general peace, and was the first absolute monarch of the Roman world. His long and comparatively tranquil reign was a brilliant period of national history. Under the supremacy of the Augustan age, innumerable divinities, from Syria, Egypt, Arabia, Persia, Africa, Spain, Gaul, Germany, and Britain, received Roman forms and personifications; but in all instances, wherever traces of grandeur or beauty appeared, they attested that which had been pillaged and transferred from ancient Greece. The distinguishing character and leading principle of the Roman state, from the earliest to the latest period of its history, was political idolatry in its most frightful shape, the greatest aberration of paganism. The spoils of all nations were made to flow into the "Eternal City," and the known world wore her chains. The Orontes and the Ganges, the Nile and the Thames, were tributary to the Tiber. The invincible legions held every province in awe, gold and silver were as profuse as iron, and to be a Roman citizen was the ambition of a life. The Capitol, from its rocky height looked serenely down on a thousand temples, sacrificial processions went daily