as the penetrating eye of the lover, even now, sees that it could bloom. Love, then, and sympathy, particularly towards the sinful and diseased, a love relieved of sentimentality by the deliberate practice of healing, warning, and comforting; a complete aversion from all the interests of political society, and a confident expectation of a cataclysm that should suddenly transfigure the world--such was Christian religion in its origin. The primitive Christian was filled with the sense of a special election and responsibility, and of a special hope. He was serene, abstracted, incorruptible, his inward eye fixed on a wonderful revelation. He was as incapable of attacking as of serving the state; he despised or ignored everything for which the state exists, labour, wealth, power, felicity, splendour, and learning. With Christ the natural man in him had been crucified, and in Christ he had risen again a spiritual man, to walk the earth, as a messenger from heaven, for a few more years. His whole life was an experience of perpetual graces and miracles. The prophecy about the speedy end of this wicked world was not fulfilled as the early Christians expected; but this fact is less disconcerting to the Christian than one would suppose. The spontaneous or instinctive Christian--and there is such a type of mind, quite apart from any affiliation to historic Christianity--takes a personal and dramatic view of the world; its values and even its reality are the values and reality which it may have for him. It would profit him nothing to win it, if he lost his own soul. That prophecy about the destruction of nature springs from this attitude; nature must be subservient to the human conscience; it must satisfy the hopes of the prophet and vindicate the saints. That the years should pass and nothing should seem to happen need not shatter the force of this prophecy for those whose imagination it excites. This world must actually vanish very soon for each of us; and this is the point of view that counts with the Christian mind. Even if we consider posterity, the kingdoms and arts and philosophies of this world are short lived; they shift their aims continually and shift their substance. The prophecy of their destruction is therefore being fulfilled continually; the need of repentance, if one would be saved, is truly urgent; and the means of that salvation cannot be an operation upon this world, but faith in another world that, in the experience of each soul, is to follow upon it. Thus the summons to repent and the prophecy about destiny which were the root of Christianity, can fully retain their spirit when for "this wicked world" we read "this transitory life" and for "the coming of the Kingdom" we read "life everlasting." The change is important, but it affects the application rather than the nature of the gospel. Morally there is a loss, because men will never take so hotly what concerns another life as what affects this one; speculatively, on the other