(3.) Christianity, by starting religion as an independent moral association altogether separate from the State, at once purified the sphere of the Church from corrupting elements, and confined the State within those bounds which the nature of a civic administration furnishes. Religion in this way was purified and elevated, because in its nicely segregated sphere no secular considerations of any kind could interfere to tone down its ideal, direct its current, or lame its efficiency; while the State, on the other hand, was saved from the folly of intermeddling with matters which it did not understand, and professing principles which it did not believe. (4.) Christianity, by planting itself emphatically at the very first start, as one may see in the Sermon on the Mount, in direct antagonism to ritualism, ceremonialism, and every variety of externalism, and placing the essence of all true religion in regeneration, or, as St. Paul has it, a new creature--_i.e._ the legitimate practical dominance of the spiritual and ethical above the sensual and carnal part of our nature--broke down the middle wall of partition which had so often divided piety from morality; so that now a man of culture might consistently give his right hand to religion and his left hand to philosophy, an attitude which, so long as Homer was all that the Greeks had for a bible, no devout Hellenist could assume. (5.) By placing a firm belief in a future life as a guiding prospect in the foreground, the religion of Christ gave the highest possible value to human life, and the strongest possible spur to perseverance in a virtuous career. (6.) By appealing directly to the individual conscience, and making religion a matter of personal concern and of moral conviction, it raised the value of each individual as a responsible moral agent, and placed the dignity of every man as a social monad on the firmest possible pedestal. (7.) By making love its chief motive power, it supplied both the steam and the oil of the social machine with a continuity of moral force never dreamt of in any of the ancient societies--a force which no mere socialistic schemes for organising labour, no boards of health, no political economy, no mathematical abstractions, no curiosities of physical science, no democratic suffrages, and no school inspectorships, though multiplied a thousand times, apart from this divine agency, can ever hope to achieve.