stoop to such base compliance. It was Christianity which had done most to give real footing to such morality as Hypatia taught, but taught in vain. Why was it so strong, and she so weak? Why could she not raise the soul of heathenism without that gross, corrupt body?

Such were the doubts that darkened about her as she felt that, in spite of every hope and effort, the sun of heathendom seemed inevitably setting; as she could find only evil means wherewith to combat evil, while Zeus and Pallas gave no sign, and appeared regardless, as the epicurean infidel had declared them, of the triumph of their destroyer, of the tears and the sacrifice of their last and truest votary. Philammon, too, discovers that even Hypatia cannot stoop from her pride of purity to succour his outcast sister, that philosophy has no mercy to proclaim for publicans and sinners, that, at his sorest need, it abandons him, freezes pity with the name of destiny, and mocks, with a selfish abstraction, the pleading misery of his love and fear. As a last resource,-to reassure, if possible, her failing faith, to grasp a something beyond her own thoughts, Hypatia has recourse to the ecstasy Plotinus taught. She discovers, to her dismay, that even the mystic trance brings her nothing from without; that she herself is her own object, even there; that she does but project the phantom of her own misery on the mysterious void. A step lower yet - desperate, but natural - she accepts the aid of Miriam's theurgic art, who professes to summon her a god in visible human form. But, alas! the Apollo proves a real, but too palpable man; and Hypatia, in an agony of shame and resentment, finds herself the victim of a shameful trick.

Raphael Aben-Ezra is one of those powerful characters in which Mr. Kingsley is most successful. His own sympathies manifestly lie most strongly with natures daring and robust both in mind and body. The chapter, entitled, 'The Bottom of the Abyss,' which describes the descent of Raphael from depth to depth of doubt, till he follows his dog as the best teacher he has, is a fine illustration of the utter inability of the most ingenious theories of the universe

to satisfy minds of the largest capacity. He has nothing of the sentimentalism whose luxuriant growth could conceal, in the case of Hypatia, the gaps and crevices of her philosophic structure. To his keen insight, allegorical mathematics, the spiritual significance of conic sections, the divine lessons unfolded in the petals of the flower of Isis, appear, as they actually are, the idlest child's play. He looks both sides of a question too fully in the face to be a common sceptic, only incredulous of what he resolves to deny, and blindly credulous of certain phantasms created in its place. A true doubter, he doubts concerning his doubts, and when, for the first time, he beholds near at hand that beautiful thing, a consistent Christian life, the vision shines on a mind as clear of the prejudices of scepticism as of the prejudices of faith-a mere tabula rasa, and awakes a hope which grows into conviction. It is because they lack the breadth of view exhibited in such a character, that men like Newman and Parker imagine they have found a medium and a resting-place in their deistic intuitionalism, in a subjective religion of sentiment, which enables them to believe what they will without giving a reason to any man—a religion which bows to the witness of the fancy without a question, and disdains the testimony of history with as little question also-as though men could only be deceived by others, and never by themselves. Raphael says—

'I don't want to possess a faith. I want a faith which will possess me. And if I ever arrived at such a one, believe me, it would be by some such practical demonstration as this very tent has given me.

"This tent?

'Yes, sir, this tent; within which I have seen you and your children lead a life of deeds as new to me the Jew, as they would be to Hypatia the Gentile. I have watched you for many a day, and not in vain. When I saw you, an experienced officer, encumber your flight with wounded men, I was only surprised. But since I have seen you, and your daughter, and strangest of all, your gay young Alcibiades of a son, starving yourselves to feed those poor

ruffians-performing for them, day and night, the offices of menial slaves-comforting them, as no man ever comforted me-blaming no one but yourselves, caring for every one but yourselves, sacrificing nothing but yourselves; and all this without hope of fame or reward, or dream of appeasing the wrath of any god or goddess, but simply because you thought it right . . . . when I saw that, sir, and more which I have seen; and when, reading in this book here, I found most unexpectedly those very grand moral rules which you were practising, seeming to spring unconsciously, as natural results, from the great thoughts, true or false, which had preceded them; then, sir, I began to suspect that the creed which produces such deeds as I have watched within the last few days, might have on its side not merely a slight preponderance of probabilities, but what we Jews used once to call, when we believed in it—or in anything the mighty power of God.'-Vol. ii. p. 34.

To turn now from heathenism-divided between a fanciful spiritualism and a grovelling superstition-between a thoughtful scepticism and a thoughtless indifference-doomed alike in its belief and in its disbelief, to its successful rival, the Church. Christianity in the fifth century was disfigured by a wide-spread corruption, but paganism was in no condition either to rival its excellences or to take advantage of its faults. Only too many of the follies associated with heathen worship were conserved by incorporation in that church which made a ruin of every heathen shrine. There is an Indian valley in which it is said that gigantic trees have pierced and rent the walls of a long-deserted idol temple. That resistless vegetation, with its swelling girth and gnarled arms, has anticipated the work of time; but it has been itself distorted while it has destroyed. Large slabs and fragments of stone are encased in the wood, and the twisted bark discovers here and there, among the shadows of the leaves, groups of petty gods which its growth has partially enclosed. Thus did it happen with the mighty tree that sprang from the grain of mustard-seed, when by degrees it had received into its substance, or embraced in its development, many

an adornment from those chambers of imagery which its youthful vigour had riven and overthrown. The heathen philosopher might, with some show of justice, retort on the Christians the charge of idolatry when he saw them prostrate before an image, and confident in the miraculous virtues of a relic or a tomb. But the reproach availed him nothing, for the power of conviction lay with the adversary after all. He might accuse the Christian, as Mr. Martineau accuses Paley, of representing the Deity as a retired mechanist,—a creator withdrawn from the work of his own hands to a far-off heaven; but the evil was not amended by depriving the Divine Nature of personality and diffusing it pantheistically throughout the universe. The dispute between the heathen and the Christian on that question amounted to this-Did God create the universe by willing or by being it ? (τῷ βούλεσθαι, or τῷ εἶναι.) If the latter, man has a criminal for a Deity; if the former (as the Church said), the mystery might be fathomless, but religion was at least possible. The Neo-Platonist might point to parallels, answering plausibly at least, to many features of the Christian doctrine, in the old religions of mankind. But the labour was as idle then as now, for this, at any rate, the adversary of our faith could not and cannot deny, that Christianity was the first to seek out and to elevate the forgotten and degraded masses of mankind.

A survey of such parallels is of service only as indicative of the adaptation of Christianity to those obscure longings of the ancient world which are better understood by us than by themselves. The likeness observable between some of their ideas and those contained in the Christian revelation, is that of the dim and distorted morning shadow to the substance from which it is thrown. We see that their religious notions were not the nutriment their souls really needed, but substitutes for, or anticipations of, such veritable food. The pellets of earth, eaten by the Otomacs and the negroes, are no proof that clay can afford nourishment to man's system. They are the miserable resources of necessity, they deaden the irritability of the stomach and allay the gnawings of hunger, but they can

impart no sustenance. The religious philosophies of the old world could, in like manner, assuage a painful craving for a time, but they could not reinforce the life-blood, and resuscitate, as healthful food, the faint and emaciated frame. Over against all points of similarity is to be set this striking contrast,—for that forlorn deep, the popular mind, Christianity had a message of love and power, while heathen wisdom had none. The masses of antiquity resemble the cairnpeople of northern superstition—a race of beings said to dwell among the tombs, playing sadly on their harps, lamenting their captivity, and awaiting wistfully the great day of restitution. They call on those who pass their haunts, and ask if there is salvation for them. If man answers yes, they play blithely all the night through; if he says, 'You have no Redeemer,' they dash their harps upon the stones, and crouch, silent and weeping, in the gloomy recesses of their cavern. Such a dark and ignorant sighing to be renewed was heard from time to time from those tarrying spirits in prison among the untaught multitudes of ancient time. They questioned philosophy, and at her cold denial shrank away, and hid themselves again in their place of darkness. They questioned Christianity, and at her hopeful answer they began to sing.

Once more, the enemy of the Cross was reduced in that time, as in our own, to the inconsistency of extending the largest charity possible to every licentious and cruel faith that had led man's wandering farther yet astray, while he refuses even common candour to the belief of the Christian in his Saviour. Similarly, Mr. Parker must speak with tenderness of those multifarious types of the religious sentiment which have identified homicide with worship and deity with lust; but when he comes across an evangelical—farewell calm philosophy, and welcome bitterness and bile! Mr. Parker might reply, in the nineteenth century, as Theon would have replied in the fifth-But those Christians are so intolerant, and will have it that everything unchristian is ungodly; they will not