the stupor of a mere animal existence, to eager expectator sne a generous hope of bettering their condition. The scen a fifteen-inch gun in the harbor of Nagasaki, stirring the hears of thoughtful Japanese to self-sacrifice, if need be, se for their native land material advantages symbolized b ships and big guns;" and the eager inquiry of Messa Nyanza for white men to teach his people the arts to en life, are but illustrations of the intellectual agencies of our ne ern life in securing a new and higher unity to means of diffusing the knowledge and the o world, contrast the slow labor of Cicero's erste WIL steam presses of one of our great publishing boses

II. The decay of the old religious faiths ago cline of morals at the opening of the Christia en the necessity for the new and more potent fore pel, have been so ably and so fully discussed In in the first seven chapters of "The Beginne and by Dr. Uhlhorn in the first two chapters L of Christianity with Heathenism" as to leave man be said.

4

combined both, who denied the gods with Epicurus, and yet prayed and worshiped before every shrine; when a wager might be laid that the more lax a woman was the more devoutly she worshiped Isis." So Uhlhorn* writes of the fickle. Greek who at evening, in the comedy, laughed at the same gods to whom he offered sacrifices the next morning in their temples.

In the pages of the "Missionary Herald" and in letters from missionaries at different points in the heathen world, may be found many passages, descriptive of the worship and religious. sentiment of Chinese, Japanese, Hindoos, and other nationalities, that might almost have been quoted from the authors just named. In China, the same priest will serve the convenience of different sects in the same temple. Japanese laugh at the religious ceremonies they are observing, rather as holiday amusements than as worship.

It would be difficult to find a better description of the posi tion of large numbers of educated Hindoos at the present time, thousands of whom have enjoyed the advantages of high English education from which Christianity in its principles has been purposely excluded, than is given by Uhlhorn in speaking of the educated classes in the Roman Empire of the first century, "Faith in the gods of the old religions had disappeared. In its place had come sheer Atheism and Nihilism, though only, it may be, among individuals, (at least only such ventured openly to express it). The majority substituted a kind of Monotheism. They imagined something godlike above the gods, a divine first principle, or at least they had a presentment of this without clearly discerning it, and especially without being able, definitely, to distinguish it from the world. This dissolving Polytheism led naturally to Pantheism. As the many deities of the heathen were all Nature-gods, so must the one Deity, in whom these all met, be a Nature-god. Nature itself is God; and the conviction which Strabo utters as his own was doubtless that of many :-'The one highest being is that which embraces us all; which we call heaven, world, and the nature of the universe.' Doubtless there was in this Monotheism a presage of the true God, a longing and reaching forth by Heathen

* Vol. iv. p. 47.

ism after something higher, a testimony of the soul by nature Christian, as Tertullian says. But the One was still only 'the unknown God whom ye ignorantly worship.' The heathen did not go beyond this. The Monotheism, to which they came at last, remained abstract, lifeless. The God vaguely conceived of as above the gods was no divine being who has talked with men and who can be named and supplicated. Therefore this conviction, however widely it was diffused in cultivated circles, proved, on the whole, powerless. It gained no influence over public opinion and morals. The educated who shared it did not thereby attain to any higher worship, but remained continually in suspense between this, their own better conviction, and a hypocritical (we cannot otherwise term it) participation in the official rites."* Hundreds of this class crowded around Prof. Seelye, at Bombay, and Puna. Dissatisfied with the old faiths of India, some were seeking in the older literature of the Vedas, made accessible to them by English scholarship, a religious creed and a system of ethics, that should rival, if possible, the claims of Christianity; while others like Keshub Chunder Sen, recognizing the power of sin over the human heart, and the consequent degradation of man's spiritual nature, seem at times ready almost to accept of Christ as the Redeemer. Certainly no one has paid a higher tribute to the personal influence of Christ on the present condition of the millions of India than Chunder Sen, in his recent addresses.

Not only in purely heathen countries, but in some sections. of nominally Christian lands, where ritual observances and faith in the Papal hierarchy, have taken the place of the gospel, do we find singular correspondences to the religious and moral life of the ancient world. The graphic picture of the character and career of Petronious, the arbiter of taste and the special favorite at the court of Nero, finds its representatives in many centers of our high civilization and preeminently among the cultured classes of Italy and Austria; "a life without God, a life of prosperity and of most highly refined enjoyment; not coarsely material but finely cultured and art-loving, yet without any deeper meaning."+

The utter absence of all spiritual life while forms of religious worship are kept up, finds abundant illustration in the Oriental churches and among the degraded masses of the Roman Catholic church in all countries. The patroness saint of thieves, at Lyons, is only the more devoutly worshiped as her devotees are the more active and successful in their vocation. The brigands of southern Italy and of Greece, and the Mexican fanatics, whose hands have been imbrued in the blood of Protestants, during the last few years, are careful observers of the forms of worship prescribed by the church.

Somewhat parallel to this loss of true religious sentiment and devotion to forms, is the attention given to ethics as a science when religious life and character run low. The moral sentiment thus finds expression where it has ceased to control the life. The Moralists of Rome have long since found their peers in China, just as men of our day who would substitute culture for Christian life, to whom Christ crucified is foolishness, still profess to hold to "a power that makes for righteousness." The age and the people that have lost faith in things supernatural are wont to lay the greater stress on morality.

It is, however, no longer a few nations around the Mediterranean, but the unevangelized nations of the whole world, that now wait for the coming of the Lord. Heathenism is everywhere disintegrating. The absurdities and follies of its rites. and superstitions are only too manifest in the light that now illumines the dark corners of the earth. The greater the intelligence the more rapid the disintegration. Time was when centuries made little difference in the social life and moral character of a heathen nation. That time has passed. Through the various agencies of our modern civilization, a new era has come, an era of change and of transition. The moral decline. that must follow unless arrested by the instant and wide spread proclamation of the gospel is something fearful to contemplate.

III. The dispersion of the Jews, their presence in all the more important cities throughout the Roman Empire, and the influence they were exerting in behalf of Monotheism, and in awakening an expectation of some great change in the religious world, find a parallel in the wide dispersion of the English race in all parts of the globe, and in the prestige gained for the civ

ilization and the religion they represent. Men speaking the English tongue, whether British or American, have been the pioneers of the gospel and opened the way for its proclamation by commerce and by arms, not always in ways that a Christian sentiment approves, but yet really on a scale and with results which put any special preparation through the Jews of the first century quite in the back-ground. The simple fact that the millions of India, constituting a sixth part of the human race, have been brought under English law and the influ ences of English civilization, and the Christianity that has inspired it, is one of the great facts of modern history; one of the most remarkable instances of the over-ruling Providence of God in the interests of the kingdom of Christ. Hardly less significant is the influence of men of the English race on the destinies of the millions of South Africa and Japan. The advanced position of Protestant nations thus compels the respect and excites the admiration and the emulation of the most diverse nations of heathendom, loosens the bonds of ignorance and superstition, and prepares the way for the reception of a religion which bears such fruits.

IV. It was fitting that the Greek language should be the common language of culture throughout the Roman Empire to give just expression to the new conceptions about to be introduced, and to give them the widest diffusion. The gospel was thus brought into connection with the best thought and culture of the world; grafted into the great Indo-Germanic stock. The vast significance of this event becomes only the more manifest with the lapse of time and the fuller development of the different branches of this stock, and of the parts committed to them in the social and moral regeneration of mankind.

But whatever may be said of the Greek tongue nineteen centuries ago, of its fitness to be the bearer of the gospel message and to transmit it to after times, may be said with added emphasis of our composite English speech, not only as to its richness and power of expression but still more of its wide diffusion till it is heard in every quarter of the globe, and everywhere recognized more and more as the language of the highest civilization. The best results of the thought and experience of all ages are stored in it. The men that use it have the resources of the centuries at their command.