over the proof of either doctrine; but as matter of fact and experience, there can be no doubt that they appeal to the hearts and instincts of mankind in a manner which the atheistic annihilation taught by the Buddhist philosopher never can. Something of the feeling which I have endeavoured to express, of the paramount power of Christianity as a civilizing agency, and a bond of political union, is apt to show itself instinctively where it might least be suspected. If a despot in Christendom is anxious for his throne, or if politicians find that the people long neglected are getting loose from all social and political ties, they are apt to call in the Christian teacher, as though he possessed some spell, the utterance of which could calm the wild passions of unrestrained and untaught humanity. Such men forget that Christianity is no charm or magical device, and that its power rests in the hearts of believers. Let them be wise in time, and before they put away from them the teachings of Christianity, and deliberately abjure its obligations as their rule of political and social life, let them remember that such gifts are not often twice offered to men or nations; and that to nations, as to men, it may happen, after once rejecting them, to find no place for repentance, "though they seek it carefully with tears." THE CONTRAST BETWEEN PAGAN AND CHRISTIAN SOCIETY. THE use of Sacrifice, it is admitted, has been very general, or we may perhaps say universal, throughout the world. Wherever at least there has been an idea of God, and a belief in His existence as an efficient agent in the world around us, there has been the use of Sacrifice. As far as we can trace, the practice or rite has reached back to the remotest. antiquity. It has been enjoined in religious systems which claim to be even more ancient than that of Moses and of the Bible. We find it in the Vedas no less clearly than in the Hebrew Scriptures. In Persia and Phoenicia and Egypt and Arabia, it dates probably as far back in the night of ages as any that can be alleged from the Divine records with regard to the children of Israel, or of the patriarchs before them. We must either ascribe its origin to a primitive, or so-called patriarchal revelation-a Divine command delivered through unknown channels, ages before Moses, to a race far earlier than the Jewish, and suppose it to have been propagated by this race throughout the nations of the earth, and the Jewish nation among the rest-or we must conceive the idea to have grown up instinctively in the heart of man, and spread by natural diffusion from clime to clime, from religion to religion; to have been embraced, under the teaching of the Hebrew lawgiver and under the special sanction of the Mosaic revelation, by the children of Israel from this common human original. The belief in a Divine revelation to the Jews and Christians seems to me to be in nowise concerned with the solution of this question. The elder and the later Scriptures are equally silent as to the origin of Sacrifice; they nowhere declare or presume that the idea was Divinely revealed, or the practice authoritatively enjoined by God. In the earliest of our Scriptures Sacrifice is always spoken of as a thing in common use, but no hint is given of its having been originally commanded. And, accordingly, different views have been held upon the subject. The ancient Fathers, it may be observed, generally held that the practice was purely natural in its origin; and the ancient Fathers, familiar as they were with the heathen world, had a wider sympathy with it, and believed better things, and hoped better things of it, and of the hold it had, however imperfectly, upon Divine truth, than the theological schools of later and less liberal ages. But, setting aside this question as of little practical |