SOME months back, we published a little essay, that might easily be expanded into a very large volume; and ultimately into a perfectly new philosophy of Roman history, in proof that Rome was self-barbarized-barbarized ab intra, and not by foreign enemies. The evidences of this, (1.) in the death of her literature, and, 2.) in the instant oblivion which swallowed up all public transactions, are so obvious as to challenge notice from the most inattentive reader. For instance, as respects this latter tendency, what case can be more striking, than the fact that Trebellius Pollio, expressly dedicating himself to such researches, and having the state documents at his service, cannot trace, by so much as the merest outline, the biography of some great officers who had worn the purple as rebels, though actually personal friends of his own grandfather? So nearly connected as they were with his own age and his own family, yet had they utterly perished for want of literary memorials! A third indication of barbarism, in the growing brutality of the army and the Emperor, is of a nature to impress many readers even more powerfully, and especially by contrast with the spirit of Roman warfare in its republican period. Always it had been an insolent and haughty warfare; but, upon strong motives of policy, sparing in bloodshed. Whereas, latterly, the ideal of a Roman general was approaching continually nearer to the odious standard of a caboceer amongst the Ashantees. Listen to the father of his people (Gallienus) issuing his paternal commands for the massacre, in cold blood, of a whole district-not foreign but domestic-after the offence had become almost obsolete: "Non satis. facies mihi, si tantum armatos occideris quos et fors belli interimere potuisset. Perimendus est omnis sexus virilis:" and, lest even this sweeping warrant should seem liable to any merciful distinctions, he adds circumstantially-" Si et senes atque impuberes sine meâ reprehensione occidi possent." And thus the bloody mandate winds up : "Occidendus est quicunque malè voluit, occidendus est quiquncue malè dixit contra me: La

cera, occide, concide." Was ever such a rabid tiger found, except amongst the Hyder Alis or Nadir Shahs of half-civilized or decivilized tribes? Yet another and a very favourite Emperor out-herods even this butcher, by boasting of the sabring which he had let loose amongst crowds of helpless

women.

The fourth feature of the Roman barbarism upon which we insisted, viz. the growing passion for trivial anecdotage in slight of all nobler delineations, may be traced, in common with all the other features, to the decay of a public mind and a common connecting interest, amongst the different members of that vast imperial body. This was a necessity, arising out of the merely personal tenure by which the throne was held. Competition for dignities, ambition under any form, could not exist with safety under circumstances which immediately attracted a blighting jealousy from the highest quarter. Where hereditary succession was no fixed principle of state-no principle which all men were leagued to maintain-every man, in his own defiance, might be made an object of anxiety in proportion to his public merit. Not conspiring, he might still be placed at the head of a conspiracy. There was no oath of allegiance taken to the emperor's family, but only to the emperor personally. But if it was thus dangerous for a man to offer himself as a participator in state honours; on the other hand, it was impossible for a people to feel any living sympathy with a public grandeur in which they could not safely attempt to participate. Simply to be a member of this vast body was no distinction at all: honour could not attach to what was universal. One path only lay open to personal distinction; and that, being haunted along its whole extent by increasing danger, naturally bred the murderous spirit of retaliation or pre-occupation. It is besides certain, that the very change wrought in the nature of warlike rewards and honours, contributed to cherish a spirit of atrocity amongst the officers. Triumphs had been granted of old for conquests; and these were generally obtained much more by intellectual qualities than by any display of qualities merely or rudely martial. Triumphs were now a forbidden fruit to any officer less than Augustan. And this one change, had there been no other, sufficed to throw the efforts of military men into a direction more humble, more directly personal, and more brutal. It became dangerous to be too conspicuously victorious. There yet remains a letter, amongst the few surviving from that unlettered period, which whispers a thrilling caution to a great officer, not to be too meritorious: "dignus eras triumpho," says the letter, "si antiqua tempora extarent." But what of that? What signified merit that was to cost a man his head? And the letter goes on to add this gloomy warning" Memor cujusdam ominis, cautius velim vincas." The warning was thrown away; the man (Regillianus) persisted in these imprudent victories: he was too meritorious; he grew dangerous; and he perished. Such examples forced upon the officers a less suspicious and a more brutal ambition: the laurels of a conqueror marked a man out for a possible competitor, no matter through whose ambition-his own in assuming the purple, or that of others in throwing it by force around him. The differences of guilt could not be allowed for where they made no difference in the result. But the laurels of a butcher created no jealousy, whilst they sufficed for establishing a camp reputation. And thus the danger of a higher ambition threw a weight of encouragement into the lower and more brutal.

So powerful, indeed, was this tendency-so headlong this gravitation to the brutal that unless a new force, moving in an opposite direction, had begun to rise in the political heavens, the Roman empire would have become an organized engine of barbarismbarbarous and making barbarous. This fact gives one additional motive to the study of Christian antiquities, which on so many other motives interest and perplex our curiosity. About the time of Dioclesian, the weight of Christianity was making itself felt in high places. There is a memorable scene between that Emperor and a Pagan priest representing an oracle, (that is, speaking on behalf of the Pagan interests,) full forty years before the legal establishment of Christianity, which shows how insensibly the Christian faith had crept onwards

within the fifty or sixty years previous. Such hints, such "momenta," such stages in the subtle progress of Christianity, should be carefully noted, searched, probed, improved. And it is partly because too little anxiety of research has been applied in this direction, that every student of ecclesiasti.cal history mourns over the dire sterility of its primitive fields. For the first three or four centuries we know next to nothing of the course by which Christianity moved, and the events through which its agency was developed. That it prospered, we know; but how it prospered, (meaning not through what transcendent cause, but by what circumstantial steps and gradations,) is painfully mysterious. And for much of this darkness, we must confess that it is now past all human power of illumination. Nay, perhaps it belongs to the very sanctity of a struggle, in which powers more than human were working concurrently with man, that it should be lost (like much of our earliest antediluvian history) in a mysterious gloom; and for the same reason-viz., that when man stands too near to the super-sensual world, and is too palpably co-agent with schemes of Providence, there would arise, upon the total review of the whole plan and execution, were it all circumstantially laid below our eyes, too compulsory an evidence of a supernatural agency. It is not meant that men should be forced into believing: free agencies must be left to the human belief, both in adopting and rejecting, else it would cease to be a moral thing, or to possess a moral value. Those who were contemporary to these great agencies, saw only in part; the fractionary mode of their perceptions intercepted this compulsion from them. But as to us, who look back upon the whole, it would perhaps have been impossible to secure the same immunity from compulsion, the same integrity of the free, unbiased choice, unless by darkening the miraculous agencies, obliterating many facts, and disturbing their relations. In such a way the equality is maintained between generation and generation; no age is unduly favoured, none penuriously depressed. Each has its separate advantages, each its peculiar difficulties. The worst has not so little light as to have a plea for infidelity. The best has not so much as to overpower the freedom of election a freedom which is indispensable to all moral value, whether in doing or in suffering, in believing or denying.

Meantime, though this obscurity of primitive Christianity is past denying, and possibly, for the reason just given, not without an a priori purpose and meaning, we nevertheless maintain that something may yet be done to relieve it. We need not fear to press into the farthest recesses of Christian antiquity, under any notion that we are prying into forbidden secrets, or carrying a torch into shades consecrated to mystery. For wherever it is not meant that we should raise the veil, there we shall carry our torch in vain. Precisely as our researches are fortunate, they authenticate themselves as privileged: and in such a chase all success justifies itself.

No scholar-not even the wariest -has ever read with adequate care those records which we still possess, Greek or Latin, of primitive Christianity. He should approach this subject with a vexatious scrutiny. He should lie in ambush for discoveries, as we did in reading Josephus.

Let us examine his chapter on the Essenes, and open the very logic of the case, its very outermost outline, in these two sentences: - A thing there is in Josephus, which ought not to be there; this thing we will call Epsilon, (E.) A thing there is which ought to be in Josephus, but which is not; this thing we call Chi, (X.)

The Epsilon, which ought not to be there, but is what is that? It is the pretended philosophical sect amongst the Jews, to which Josephus gives the name of Essenes; this ought not to be in Josephus, nor any where else, for certain we are that no such sect ever existed.

The Chi, which ought by every obligation-obligations of reason, passion, interest, common sense-to have been more broadly and emphatically present in the Judæan history of Josephus' period than in any other period whatever, but unaccountably is omitted -what is that? It is, reader, neither more nor less than the new-born brotherhood of Christians. The whole monstrosity of this omission will not be apparent to the reader, until his attention be pointed closely to the chronological position of Joseph-his longitude as respects the great meridian of the Christian era.

The period of Josephus' connexion with Palestine, running abreast, (as it were,) with that very generation succeeding to Christ with that very Epichristian age which dated from the crucifixion, and terminated in the destruction of Jerusalem-how, by what possibility, did he escape all knowledge of the Christians as a body of men that should naturally have challenged notice from the very stocks and stones of their birthplace; the very echo of whose footsteps ought to have sunk upon the ear with the awe that belongs to spiritual phenomena? There were circumstances of distinction in the very closeness of the confederation that connected the early Christians, which ought to have made them interesting. But, waiving all that, what a supernatural awe must naturally have attended the persons of those who laid the corner-stone of their faith in an event so affecting and so appalling as the Resurrection! The Chi, therefore, that should be in Josephus, but it is not, how can we suggest any approximation to a solution of this mystery-any clue towards itany hint of a clue ?

True it is, that an interpolated passage, found in all the printed editions of Josephus, makes him take a special and a respectful notice of our Saviour. But this passage has long been given up as a forgery by all scholars. And in another essay on the Epichristian era, which we shall have occasion to write, some facts will be laid before the reader exposing a deeper folly in this forgery than is apparent at first sight.

True it is, that Whiston makes the astounding discovery that Josephus was himself an Ebionite Christian. Josephus a Christian! In the instance before us, were it possible that he had been a Christian, in that case the wonder is many times greater, that he should have omitted all notice of the whole body as a fraternity acting together with a harmony unprecedented amongst their distracted countrymen of that age; and, secondly, as a fraternity to whom was assigned a certain political aspect by their enemies. The civil and external relations of this new party he could not but have noticed, had he even omitted the religious doctrines which bound them together internally, as doctrines too remote from Roman comprehension. In reality, so far from being a Christian, we shall show that Josephus was not even a Jew, in any conscientious or religious sense. He had never taken the first step in the direction of Christianity; but was, as many other Jews were in that age, essentially a Pagan; as little impressed with the true nature of the God whom his country worshipped, with his ineffable purity and holiness, as any idolatrous Athenian whatsoever.

The wonder therefore subsists, and revolves upon us with the more violence, after Whiston's efforts to ex tinguish it how it could have happened that a writer, who passed his infancy, youth, manhood, in the midst of a growing sect so transcendently interesting to every philosophic mind, and pre-eminently so interesting to a Jew, should have left behind him, in'a compass of eight hundred and fiftyfour pages, double columns, each column having sixty-five lines, (or a double ordinary octavo page,) much of it relating to his own times, not one paragraph, line, or fragment of a line, by which it can be known that he ever heard of such a body as the Christians. And to our mind, for reasons which we shall presently show, it is equally wonderful that he should talk of the Essenes, under the idea of a known, stationary, original sect amongst the Jews, as that he should not talk of the Christians; equally wonderful that he should remember the imaginary as that he should forget the real. There is not one difficulty, but two difficulties; and what we need is, not one solution but two solutions.

If, in an ancient palace, re-opened after it had been shut up for centuries, you were to find a hundred golden shafts or pillars, for which nobody could suggest a place or a use; and if, in some other quarter of the palace, far remote, you were afterwards to find a hundred golden sockets fixed in the floor-first of all, pillars which nobody could apply to any purpose, or refer to any place; secondly, sockets which nobody could fill; -probably even " wicked Will Whiston" might be capable of a glimmering suspicion that the hundred golden shafts belonged to the hundred golden sockets. And if, upon applying the shafts to the sockets, it should turn out that each several shaft screwed into its own peculiar socket, why, in such a case, not "Whiston, Ditton, and Co." could resist the evidence, that each

enigma had brought a key to the other; and that by means of two mysteries there had ceased even to be one mystery.

Now, then, first of all, before stating our objections to the Essenes as any permanent or known sect amongst the Jews, let us review as rapidly as possible the main features by which Joseph characterises these supposed Essenes; and in a brief comment point out their conformity to what we know of the primitive Christians. That done, let us endeavour to explain all the remaining difficulties of the case. The words of Josephus we take from Whiston's translation; having in fact, at this moment, no other copy within reach. But we do this unwillingly: for Whiston was a poor Grecian; and, what is worse, he knew very little about English.

"The third sect" (i. e. thirdin relation to the Pharisees, who are ranked as the first, and the Sadducees, who are ranked as the second) "are called Essenes. These last are Jews by birth, and seem to have a greater affection for one another than the other sects have."

We need not point out the strong conformity in this point to the distinguishing features of the new-born Christians, as they would be likely to impress the eye of a stranger. There was obviously a double reason for a stricter cohesion amongst the Christians internally, than could by possibility belong to any other sect-1st, in the essential tendency of the whole Christian faith to a far more intense love than the world could comprehend, as well as in the express charge to love one another; 2dly, in the strong compressing power of external affliction, and of persecution too certainly anticipated. The little flock, turned out to face a wide world of storms, naturally drew close together. Over and above the indefeasible hostility of the world to a spiritual morality, there was the bigotry of Judaical superstition on the one hand, and the bigotry of Paganism on the other. All this would move in mass against nascent Christianity, so soon as that moved; and well, therefore, might the instincts of the early Christians instruct them to act in the very closest concert and communion.

"These men are despisers of riches, and so very communicative, as raises our admiration. Nor is there any