the moral government of the world and the issues of peace and war in the hands of an omnipotent, all-wise, all-beneficent, and absolute Jove. These and the like considerations will lead the thoughtful student of history easily to understand how the appearance of such an extraordinary moral force as Christianity was imperatively called for at the period when our Saviour, with His divine mission to a fallen race, began His preaching on the shores of a lonely Galilean lake; and the most superficial glance at the contents of His preaching, as contrasted with the heathenism which it replaced, will show how wonderful was the new start which it gave to the moral life of the world, and how effective the spur which it applied to the march of the ages--a spur so potent that we may, without the slightest exaggeration, say that to Christianity we owe almost exclusively whatever mild agencies tempered the harshness and sweetened the sourness of crude government in the Middle Ages; and no less, whatever hopeful elements are at the present moment working among ourselves to save the British people, at a critical stage of their social development, from the decadence and the degradation that overtook the Romans after their great military mission had been fulfilled. Let us look articulately at the main constituents of that new leaven wherewith Christianity was equipped to regenerate the world. These I find to be-- (1.) By asserting in the strongest way the unity of God, it at once cut the root of the tendency in human nature to create arbitrary objects of worship according to the lust or fancy of the worshipper, and accustomed the popular intelligence to a harmonised view of the various forces at work in the constitution of a world so various and so complex as to a superficial view readily to appear contradictory and irreconcilable. (2.) By preaching the unity of God, not as an abstract metaphysical idea, but as what it really is, a divine fatherhood, Christianity at one stroke bound all men together as brethren and members of a common family; and in this way, while in the relation of nation to nation it substituted apostleships of love for wars of subjugation, in the relation of class to class it established a sort of spiritual democracy, in which the implied equality of all men as men gradually led to the abolition of the abnormal institution of slavery, on which all ancient society rested.