leprous in his forehead, and they thrust him out from thence; yea, himself hasted also to go out, because the Lord had smitten him." So much for Polytheism. That it should have served the spiritual needs of the human heart so long--five thousand years at least, from the first Pharaoh that looked down from his Memphian pyramid on the mystic form of the Sphinx, to the last Roman Emperor that sacrificed white bulls from Clitumnus at the altar of the Capitoline Jove--is proof sufficient that, with all its faults, it was made of very serviceable stuff; but creeds and kingdoms, like individuals, must die. At the commencement of the eighth century of the Roman Republic heathenism was doomed in all Romanised Europe, in all Northern Africa, and in Western Asia, and that for four reasons. The polytheistic religions of the Old World, created as they were in the infancy of society, no doubt under the guidance of a healthy instinct of dependence on the ruling power of the universe, but in the main inspired by the emotions and formulated by the imagination, without the regulating control of reason, could not hope to hold their ground permanently in the face of that rich growth of individual speculation which, from the sixth century before Christ, spread with such ample ramification from Asiatic and European Greece over the greater part of the civilised world. If it was a necessity of human beings at all times to have a religion, it was a no less urgent problem, as the range of vision enlarged with the process of the ages, to harmonise their theology with their thinking. And if, on the intellectual side, the polytheistic religions of that cultivated age were threatened with a collapse, the sensuous element, always strongly represented in emotional faiths, was in constant danger of being dragged down into a disturbing and degrading sensuality. Then, again, when the Roman Republic, in the age of Augustus Cæsar, had completed the range of its world-wide conquests, two social forces, unknown in the best ages of Greece and Rome, viz., wealth and luxury, added their perilous momentum to the corrupting elements which were already at work in the bosom of the polytheistic system. And in what a hot-bed of fermenting putridity these evil leavens had resulted at this period, the pages of Suetonius and many chapters in St. Paul are witnesses equally credible and equally tragic. Add to all this the fact that the motley intermixture of ideas and the inorganic confusion and forced assimilation of creeds which, accompanied the universal march of Roman polity, brought about a vague desire for some sort of religious unity which might run parallel with the political unity under which men lived; and this desire could be gratified only by placing in the foreground the great truth of the unity of the Supreme Being, which to vindicate in pre-Christian ages had been the special mission of the Hebrew race, and which the Greeks themselves had not indistinctly indicated by placing