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tive change. A religion had collapsed that was negative; a mockery had been exposed that was positive. It was not that restraints were resisted; there were none to resist; they had crumbled

upon society? Terror from police, and still, as ever, the Divine restraints of love and pity, honour, and domestic affections. But the conscience spoke no longer through any spiritual organs. Just at this moment it was when the confusions of Roman society, the vast expansion of the empire, the sea-like expansion of the mighty capital, the political tendencies of the whole sys tem, were all moving together towards grandeur and distraction of feeling, that the doctrine of apotheosis, applied to a man and often to a monster, towered up to cause still greater distrac tion. The Pagan pantheon had just sunk away from the support of the Roman mind. It was not only that the Pagan gods were individually too base and polluted to sustain the spiritual feelings of an expanding national intellect, but the whole collective idea of Deity was too feebly conceived by Paganism. Had the individuals of the Pantheon been purer and nobler, their doom was sealed, nevertheless, by their abstract deficiencies as modes of spiritual life for a race so growing as that of man. How unfortunate, therefore, that at this crisis, when ancient religions were crumbling into ruins, new gods should be arising from the veriest beasts amongst men-utterly repelled and rejected by the spiritual instinct in man, but suggested by a necessity of political convenience.

under the house of Antipater; and Egypt, under the Ptolomies were all deluged with Greek emigrants and settlers. Of these two races, the subtle, agile Greek, unprincipled, full of change and levity, was comparatively of little use to Chris-away spontaneously. What power still acted tianity as a centre, waiting and seeking for means of diffusion. Not only were the deeper conscientious instincts of the Romans more suited to a profound religion, as instruments for the radiation of light, but also it is certain that the military condition per se supplies some advantages towards a meditative apprehension of vast eternal problems beyond what can be supplied by the fractionary life of petty brokerage or commerce. This is also certain, that Rome itself the idea which predominated in Roman camps-cherished amongst her soldiery, from the very enormities of her state, and from the chaos of her internal life, a tendency to vast fermentations of thought favourable to revolutions in man's internal worlds of feeling and aspirations. Hence it will be found, if once a man's eye is directed into that current, that no classes of people did so much for the propagation of Christianity as the officers of the Roman army, centurions, tribunes, prefects, legates, &c., or as the aulic officers, the great ceremonial officers of the imperial court or as the aulic ladies, the great leading ladies that had practically much influence on the ear of Cæsar. The utter dying away of the Roman paganism, which had become quite as powerless to all the accomplished men and women of Rome for any purpose of terror or of momentary consolation as to us English at present the mythology of Fairies, left a frightful vacuum in the mind of Roman grandees-a horror as of voyagers upon some world floating away without helmsman or governor. In this unhappy agitation of spirit, and permanent posture of clamorous demand for light, a nidus was already forming for a deep brooding interest in any great spiritual phenomena of breadth and power that might any-long resident-had been loved and adinired-in where arise amongst men. Athens was too windy, too conceited, too shallow in feeling, to have been much impressed by the deepest revolutionary movements in religion. But in Rome, besides the far different character of the national mind, there were what may be called spiritual horrors arising, which (like dreadful nervous diseases) unfolded terrifically to the experience spiritual capacities and openings beyond what had been suspected. The great domestic convulsions of Rome, the poisonings and assassinations, that gleam so fearfully from the pictures of Juvenal, were beginning about this period. It was not that by any coarse palpable logic, as dull people understood the case, women or men said-" Accountability there is none; and we will no longer act as if there were." Accountability there never had been any; but the obscure scene of an order with which all things sympathised, men not less than the wheels of society-this had blindly produced an instinct of corresponding self-control. At present, when the Pagan religion had virtually died out, all secret restraints were breaking up; a general delirium carried, and was felt to carry, a license into all ranks; it was not a negative merely, but a posi

But oftentimes the excess of an evil is its cure, or the first impulse in that direction. From the connexion of the great Augustan and Claudian houses with the family of Herod, much knowledge of Jewish peculiarities had been diffused in Rome. Agrippa, the grandson of Herod, Bernice, and others of the reigning house in Judea, had been

*The Romans themselves saw a monstrosity in this practice which did not really exist in the metaphysical ne cessity. It was, and it was not, monstrous. In reality it was rational, or monstrons, according to theoretic construction. Generally speaking, it was but a variety of that divinity which in Christendom all of us so long ascribed with their grand monarque. The Americans of the United to kings. We English always laughed at the French States have always laughed at us English, and the sanctity with which our constitution invests the Sovereign We at the Romans upon this matter of apotheosis. And when English, French, and Americans, have all alike langhed brought before us under the idea of Seneca's apocolocon tosis, this practice has seemed too monstrous for human gravity. And yet again, we English, French, Americans, and Romans, should all have united in scorn for the deep Phrygian, Persian, or Asiatic servility to kings. We of European blood have all looked to the constitutional idea, though they also still feebly were groping after the same not the individual person of the sovereign. The Asiatics, deep idea, sought it in such a sensual body of externals, that noue but a few philosophers could keep their grasp sanctity of the English sovereign's constitutional person, on the original problem. How profound an idea is the which idea first made possible the responsibility of the sovereign's ministers. They could be responsible, only if the sovereign were not; let them be accountable, and the king might be inviolable. Now really in its secret metaphysics the Roman apotheosis meant little more. Only the accountability lay not in Caesar's ministers, but in the eternal Imperator. personal and transitory Cæsar, as distinguished from the

there were, or could be, then there were Christians without Christ; there was Christianity invented by man. Under his delineation, they existed only as King Arthur existed, or Morgan le Fay, or the sword Excalibur. Considered in their romantic pretensions, connected with the Round Table, these worthy blades of flesh and steel were pure dreams: but, as downright sober realities, known to cutlers and others, they certainly have a hold upon history. So of the Essenes : nobody could be more certain than Josephus that there were such people; for he knew the very street of Jerusalem in which they met; and in fact he had been matriculated amongst them himself. Only all that moonshine about remote seclusions, and antique derivations, and philosophie considerations, were fables of the Hesperides, or fit for the future use of Archbishop Turpin. What, then, is my own account of the Essenes ?*

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The earliest great danger to which Christianity was exposed, arose with the Jews. This was the danger that besieged the cradle of the religion. From Rome no danger arose until the time of Trajan; and, as to the nature of this danger, the very wildest mistake is made in books innumer able. No Roman anger ever did, or ever could,

the imperial family. The tragical events in Herod's own household had drawn the attention of the Roman grandees and senate to Jewish affairs. The migrations to Rome of Jewish settlers, since the era of Pharsalia, had strengthened the interest, by keeping the enigma of the Jewish history and character constantly before the Roman eye. The upper and more intellectual circles in Rome of inquiring men and women kept up this interest through their military friends in the legions quartered upon Syria and Lower Egypt, many of whom must have read the Septuagint version of the Law and the Prophets. Some whispers, though dim and scarcely intelligible, would have made their way to Rome as to the scenes of the Crucifixion, able at least to increase the attraction of mystery. But a much broader and steadier interest would have been diffused by the accounts transmitted of the Temple, so mysterious from the absence of all idol, so magnificent to the eye and the ear from its glorious service. By the time when Vespasian and his son commanded in the East, and when the great insurrection of the Jewish race in Jerusalem was commencing, Josephus must have been well aware of this deep attention to his own people gathering in the highest quarters; and he must have been aware that what was now creep-point to any doctrine of Christianity; unless, ining into the subject of profoundest inquiry amongst the Jews themselves, viz., the true pretensions, the history, doctrines, and new morals, of those Nazarene revolutionists, would, by a natural transfer, soon become the capital object of attention to all Romans interested in Judea. The game was up for the separate glory of Judaism, the honour of the Mosaic legislation was becoming a superannuated thing, if he suffered the grandeur of Christianity, as such, and recognised for Christianity to force its way upon the fermenting intellect of Rome. His discernment told him that the new Christian ethics never would be put down. That was impossible; but he fancied that it might be possible to disconnect the system of moral truth from the new but still obscure Christian sect, and to transfer its glory upon a pretended race of Hebrew recluses or immemorial eremites. As Lauder meant to say, "This may be grand, but it is not Milton's;" so did Josephus mean to say, “This may be very fine and very new, but take notice it is not Christ's." During his captivity in Roman hands and in Rome, being one of the few cowards who had spiritedly volunteered as a traitor, and being a good scholar for a Jew, as well as a good traitor and the best of cowards, he enjoyed the finest opportunities of insinuating his ridiculous legend about the Essenes into the foremost literary heads of the universal metropolis. Imperial favour, and the increasing curiosity of Rome, secured him access to the most intellectual circles. His legend was adopted by the ruling authority in the literature of the earth; and an impossible lie became signed and countersigned for many centuries to come.

But how did this particular form arise for the lie? Were there no such people as the Essenes ? Why, no; not as Josephus described them: if

deed, in times long subsequent, when the Christian doctrines, though otherwise indifferent to the Roman authorities, would become exponents or convertible signs of the firm disloyalty to Cæsar which constitutes the one great offence of Christians. Will you burn incense to Cæsar? No. Well, that is your State crime, Christian; that, and neither less nor more. With the Jews the case was exactly reversed; they cared nothing about the external ceremonies (or cultus) of the Christians, what it was they practised, or what it was they refused to practise. A treasonable distinction would even have been a recommendation in their eyes; and as to any differences between their own ritual and the Christian, for these (had they been more or greater than they were) the ruling Jews would readily have found the same indulgence which they found for other schismatics, or imperfect proselytes, or doubtful brothers, or known Gentiles. All these things were trifles: what they cared about was exactly what the Romans did not care about, viz., the Christian doetrines in relation to Moses and the Messiah. Was the Messiah come? Were the prophecies accomplished? Was the Mosaic economy of their nation self-dissolved, as having reached its appointed terminus, or natural euthanasy, and lost itself in a new order of things? This concerned their existence as a separate people. If that were the Messiah, whom the Christians gave out for such, then all the fabric of their national hopes, their visions of an earthly restoration, were shattered, Into this question shot itself the whole agony of their hereditary interest and pride as the children of Abraham. The Jewish nature was now roused in good earnest. So much we may see sufficiently in the Acts of the Apostles; and we may be assured by more than one reflection, that the Jew

ish leaders at that time were resolved not again to commit the error of relaxing their efforts until the work of extermination was perfect. They felt, doubtless not without much surprise, but still with some self-reproach, that they had been too negligent in assuming the sect to have been trampled out by the judicial death of its leader. Dispersion had not prevented the members of the sect from recombining; and even the public death as a malefactor of the leader was so far from having dimmed the eyes or dejected the hopes of the body, that, under the new colouring given to it by the Christians, this very death had become the most triumphant of victories. There was, besides, a reason to dread the construction of the Romans upon this heresy, if it continued longer to defy public suppression. And there was yet another uneasiness that must greatly have been increasing an uneasiness of an affecting nature, and which long afterwards, in ages nearer to our own, constituted the most pathetic feature in Christian martyrdoms. Oftentimes those who resorted to the fiery spectacle in pure hatred of the martyr, or who were purposely brought thither to be warned by salutary fear, were observed by degrees to grow thoughtful; instead of reaping confirmation in their feelings of horror, they seemed dealing with some internal struggle, musing, pausing, reflecting, and at length enamoured as by some new-born love, languishing in some secret fascination. Those that in Pagan days caught in forests a momentary glimpse of the nymphs and sylvan goddesses, were struck with a hopeless passion: they were nympholepts: the affection, as well known as epilepsy, was called nympholepsy. This parallel affection, in those that caught a momentary celestial glimpse from the countenances of dying martyrs, by the side of their fiery couches, might be called martyrolepsy. And many were they that saw the secret glance. In mountainous lands, oftentimes when looking down from eminences far above the level of lakes and valleys, it has happened that I could not see the sun the sun was hidden behind some gloomy mass of clouds; but far below I beheld, tremulously vibrating on the bosom of some half-hidden lake, a golden pillar of solar splendour which had escaped through rifts and rents in the clouds that to me were as invisible as the sun himself. So in the martyrdom of the protomartyr St. Stephen, Paul of Tarsus, the learned Jew, could see no gates of heaven that opened, could see no solar orb: to him were visible, as the scenery about St. Stephen, nothing but darkness of error and clouds. Yet, as I far below in the lake, so he far below in the countenance of St. Stephen, saw, with consternation, reflected a golden sunlight, some radiance not earthly, which ought not to have been there. That troubled him. Whence came that? The countenance of Stephen, when the great chorus was even then arising" Stone him to death !"* shone like the countenance of an angel. That countenance, which brought down to earth some revelation of

There is a chorus of that title, powerfully conceived, in Dr. Mendelssohn's Oratorio of St. Paul.

a brightness in the sky, intercepted to Paul, perplexed him; haunted him sleeping, troubled him when awake. That face of the martyr brought down telegraphically from some altitude inaccessible to himself, a handwriting that must be suthentic. It carried off to heaven, in the very moment of death, a glory that from heaven it must have borrowed. Upon this we may be sure that Paul brooded intensely; that the effect, noticed as so often occurring at martyrdoms, was already commencing in him; and probably that the noonday scene on the road to Damascus did but quicken and ante-date a result which would at any rate have come. That very case of Paul, and no doubt others not recorded, must continually have been causing fresh uneasiness to the Jewish leaders. Their own ministers were falling off to the enemy. And now, therefore, at last they were determined, once for all, that it should be decided who was to be Master in Jerusalem.

The Apostles, on their side, and all their flock, though not losing a solemn confidence in the issue, could not fail to be alarmed. A contest of life and death was at hand. By what price of suffering and ruins the victory might need to be achieved, they could not measure. They had now faced, as they saw, without power any more to evade it, a fiery trial. Ordinary counsels would not avail; and, according to the magnitude of the crisis, it became the first of duties to watch warily every step they should take, since the very first false one might happen to prove irretrievable. The interests of the youthful church were confided to their hands. Less than faithful they could not be; but for the present that was not enough. To be faithful in extremity was all that might remain at last; but for the present, the summons was-to be wise, so as to intercept that extremity, if possible. In this exigency, and with the sudden illumination which very perplexity will sometimes create, which the mere inspiration of distress will sometimes suggest, they devised the scheme of a Secret Society.

Armies of brave men have often not only honourably shut themselves up into impenetrable squares, or withdrawn altogether behind walls and batteries, but have even, by exquisite concert, suddenly dispersed over a thousand hills; have vanished at noon-day on the clapping of hands, as if into thick shadows; and again, by the clapping of hands, in a moment have reässembled in battle array. Such was the magical effect from the new device. The Christians are seen off their guard all around; spearmen wheel suddenly into view, but every Christian has vanished. The Christian is absolutely in the grasp of the serjeant ; but, unaccountably, he slips away, and a shadow only remains in the officers' hand. The Christian fugitive is before your face, he rushes round a corner, you see him as he whirls round with a mask upon his face; one bound throws you round the corner upon his traces; and then you see no fugitive at all, no mask, but a man walking in tranquillity, who readily joins you in the pursuit.

The reader must consider-1st, what it was that the Christians had to accomplish; and 2dly, how it was that such a thing could be accomplished in such almost impracticable circumstances. If the whole problem had been to bend before the storm, it was easy to do that by retiring for a season. But there were two reasons against so timid a course: first, the enemy was prepared, and watching for all such momentary expedients, waiting for the sudden forced retirement, waiting for the sudden stealthy attempt at resuming the old station; secondly, which was a more solemn reason for demur, this course might secure safety to the individual members of the church, but, in the meantime, it left the church, as a spiritual community, in a languishing condition-not only without means of extension, but without means even of repairing its own casual waste. Safety obtained on these terms was not the safety that suited apostolic purposes. It was necessary with the protection (and therefore with the present concealment) of the church to connect some machinery for nursing it-feeding it-expanding it. No theory could be conceived more audacious than the one rendered imperative by circumstances. Echo was not to babble of the whereabouts assigned to the local stations or points of rendezvous for this outcast church; and yet in this naked houseless condition she was to find shelter for her household; and yet, whilst blood-hounds were on her own traces, whilst she durst not look abroad through the mighty storm, this church was to be raising a college and a council, de propaganda fide, was to be working all day long in the centre of enemies raging for her blood, and to declare herself in permanent session when she had no foot of ground to stand upon.

This object, seemingly so impracticable, found an opening for all its parts in the community of field unavoidably cultivated by the church and the enemy of the church. Did the church seek to demonstrate the realisation of the promised Messiah in the character and history of Christ? This she must do by diligently searching the prophetic types as the inner wards of the lock, and then searching the details of Christ's life and passion as the corresponding wards of the key. Did the enemy of the church seek to refute and confound this attempt to identify the Messiahship with the person of Jesus ? This she could attempt only by labours in the opposite direction applied to the very same ground of prophecy and history. The prophecies and the traditions current in Judea that sometimes were held to explain, and sometimes to integrate, the written prophecies about the mysterious Messiah, must be alike important and alike commandingly interesting to both parties. Having, therefore, this fortunate common ground of theological study with her own antagonist, there was no reason at all why the Christian church should not set up a seminary of labourers for her own vineyard under the mask of enemies trained against herself. There was no sort of reason, in moral principle or in prudence, why she should not, under colour of training learned and fervent enemies to the Christian

name, silently prepare and arm a succession of servants for doing her own work. In order to stamp from the beginning a patriotic and intensely national character upon her new institution, leading men already by names and sounds into the impression that the great purpose of this institution was, to pour new blood into the life of old Judaic prejudices, and to build up again the dilapidation of Mosaic orthodoxy, whether due to time or to recent assaults, the church selected the name of Essen for the designation of the new society, from the name of an important gate in the temple; so that, from the original use, as well as from another application to the religious service of the temple, a college or fraternity of Essenes became, by its very name, a brief symbolic profession of religious patriotism and bigotry, or what the real bigots would consider orthodoxy, from the first, therefore, carried clear away from suspicion. But it may occur to the reader that the Christian founders would thus find themselves in the following awkward dilemma. If they carried out the seeming promise of their Judaic name, then there would be a risk. of giving from the first an anti-Christian bias to the feelings of the students, which might easily warp their views for life. And on the other hand, if by direct discipline they began at an early stage to correct this bias, there arose a worse risk, viz., that their real purposes might be suspected or unmasked. In reality, however, no such risk would arise in either direction. The elementary studies (that is, suppose in the eight first ascending classes) would be, simply to accumulate a sufficient fund of materials, of the original documents, with the commentaries of every kind, and the verbal illustrations or glosses. In this stage of the studies, at any rate, and whether the first objects had or had not been Christian, all independent judgments upon subjects so difficult and mysterious would be discouraged as presumptuous; so that no opening would arise for suspicion against the teachers, on the one hand, as unfaithful to the supposed bigotry of the institution, nor on the other for encouraging an early pre-occupation of mind against Christian views. After passing No. 8 of the classes, the delicacy of the footing would become more trying. But until the very first or innermost class was reached, when the last reserves must be laid aside, two circumstances would arise to diminish the risk. The first is this-that the nearer the student advanced to the central and dangerous circles of the art, the more opportunity would the governors have had for observing and appraising his character. Now it is evident that, altogether apart from any considerations of the danger to the society connected with falseness, treachery, or generally with anti-Christian traits of character, even for the final uses and wants of the society, none but pure, gentle, truthful, and benign minds would avail the church for Christian ministrations. The very same causes, therefore, which would point out a student as dangerous to entrust with the capital secrets of the institution, would equally have taken away from the society

all motive for carrying him farther in studies that must be thrown away for himself and others. He would be civilly told that his vocation did not seem to such pursuits; would have some sort of degree or literary honour conferred upon him, and would be turned back from the inner chambers, where he was beginning to be regarded as suspicious. Josephus was turned adrift in this way, there is no doubt. He fancied himself to have learned all, whilst in fact there were secret esoteric classes which he had not so much as suspected to exist. Knaves never passed into those rooms. A second reason, which diminished the risk, was, that undoubtedly under the mask of scholastic disputation the student was exercised in hearing all the arguments that were most

searchingly profound in behalf of Christ's Messiahship. No danger would attend this: it was necessary for polemic discipline and gymnastics, so that it always admitted of a double explanation, reconcilable alike with the true end and the avowed end. But, though used only as a passage of practice and skill, such a scene furnished means at once to the Christian teachers in disguise for observing the degrees in which different minds melted or froze before the evidence. There arose fresh aids to a safe selection. And, finally, whilst the institution of the Essenes was thus accomplishing its first mission of training up a succession to the church, and providing for her future growth, it was also providing for the secret meeting of the church and its present consolation.

A THOUGHT AT THE ROYAL ACADEMY, JUNE, 1847.

"Napoleon at Fontainebleau, the 31st March, 1814."

DEDICATED TO M. P. DELAROCHE.

Prodigious effort! Pause and see

A miracle here wrought!

Art with her skill and mystery
Endows this brow with thought.

On that stern face the soul is seen,
Look deep, the struggle's sore,
Nor Rembrandt's pencil e'er, I ween,
Pulsed canvassed features more.

The agonizing spirit groan

Is heard beneath yon frown;

The painter's skill hath scribed thereon,
"Must now my sun go down?—
My orb of empire sink in night,
My star of glory pale,

And my achievements, dazzling bright,
Become a bygone tale?

"Have I thus risen thus to fall,

And my world-echoing name In silence die, or heard, recall

The vanity of fame ?

Yet still I'll brave the vast reverse;
This my great fight shall be,

To sternly bear of fate the worse

And conquer obloquy."

Like some hoar rock whose surge-washed base

Is fixed where wrecks are cast,

Yet lifts on high a frowning face,

Or smiles as storms sweep past-
So spirit aids the struggling man
To rise 'bove lower ill;
Amidst disaster, scoff, and ban,
It towers sublimer still.

Thus Fontainebleau, Helena's cell, Will teach a lesson yet;

His day-pomp fled, yet they will tell
His night-gloom ne'er forget!

Ambition's wreck! his own sad heart
Hid other anguish deep;

He scorned foes' scorn, but friends' sad part*
Made Lodi's hero weep!

And higher still the climax rose

Louisa's loveless part

Placed Austria's daughter 'mongst his foes,
And gave th' acutest smart.

She, whom to wed, his wife of youth
Was lonely left to pine;

For policy he shattered truth,

Divorced his Josephine.

She left the man whose zenith fame

Lit her false brow with joy,
Nor sought, in loneliness and shame,
The father of her boy!

While cowards often end the strife,
And stain thine altar, Pride,
This son of empire battled life
Courageous lived and died.f

Thus, wandering here, a rustic bard
Employs a musing hour;
Painter, accept unknown regard

As tribute to thy power.

* This more particularly applies to the defection of the Duke of Ragusa :-" At length breaking this distressing silence, Napoleon exclaimed, Ungrateful man! but he will be more unhappy than I!'"

+At the moment of Bonaparte's abdication, he remarked that instruments of destruction had been left in his way; he seemed to think that they were placed there purposely, in order that he might attempt his own life; and, with a sardonic smile, said:Self-murder is sometimes committed for love-what folly! Sometimes for the loss of fortune-there it is cowardice! Another cannot live after he has been disgraced-what weakness! But to survive the loss of empire, to be exposed to the insults of one's contemporaries, that is true courage!".

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