absolutely and simply an act of religion; all immorality is departure from God, all morality return to God. In the Christian Ethics God is not a secondary figure; he is not brought in merely for a sanction: he is the central sun of the {196} whole system, from whose bright fountain of perennial excellence all the little twinkling lamps of our minor moralities are lighted up. The individual virtues of a Christian man are merely the flower and the fruit of a living plant, of which the root is theology and the sap piety; nay more, the piety accompanies the flower and the fruit, and imparts to them a fragrance and a flavour, which gives them more than half their charm. A rose without smell would still be a rose; but what a world of difference to the sense and to the sentiment would the absence of that fine invisible essence imply! Christian virtue, in fact, can no more exist without piety than Socratic virtue can exist without logic. Socrates was, no doubt, a remarkably pious man; but, while the piety of Socrates was a strong shoot from his reason, the virtue of a Christian is the fair issue of his piety. The distinct proof of what we have here stated will be found everywhere in the New Testament, but in the Acts of the Apostles specially rather than in the Gospels. For the ideal of Christian character we refer naturally to the Sermon on the Mount and to the character of our Lord as exhibited in the evangelic narrative; but for the manner in which Christianity was presented to men, for the method of operation by which in so short a time it so wonderfully overcame the stern ritualism of the Jew and the fair sensualism of the Greek, we must look to the actual facts of the great early conversions as they are presented to us in the apostolic memoirs of Luke. Let us see therefore, in the first place, what we can learn from the early chapters of that most interesting narrative. Now, the starting-point here plainly is the effusion of the Holy Ghost, an influence which, {197} whether we take it on this first occasion as miraculous, according to the traditional understanding of the Church, or as something extraordinary but in the course of nature, is a phenomenon altogether different in kind from the action of arguments upon the ratiocinative faculty of the mind, and had indeed been preceded not by inductions or deductions, or analytic dissections, or any scholastic exercitations at all, but by meetings for social prayer (i. 14)--prayer which is the great feeder of the moral nature of man when reverting to the original source of all moral life in the form of religion. It was therefore not in the philosophic way of debate and discussion, but in the religious way of inspiration that the regenerative afflatus of the first Christian Ethics came upon the Jewish and Hellenic world; and it worked, let us say, by a fervid moral contagion, not by the suasion of cool argument. And there can be no doubt, that if even in the intellectual world a wise ancient might