who opens our understandings, who renews our wills, who leads us into all truth, who teaches us to pray, and maintains the intercourse between heaven and earth. He is our instructor, our sanctifier, our comforter. Christ has redeemed us, by bearing the punishment due for our sins; but the Spirit applies this redemption to each individual, by enabling him to believe, and by working in him both "to will and to do" what God commands.

But this inability, on our part, ought not to operate on our minds as a discouragement. On the contrary, when rightly understood, it is a great and powerful incentive to those who are really desirous to be saved. If our deliverance depended on our own unaided strength, what anxiety, what despair might not a sense of our own weakness occasion? But when we remember that he who is All-good and All-sufficient, has promised to do every thing for us, if we will only employ the means which he affords, and cast ourselves entirely on the teaching of his Spirit, it is still," with fear and trembling" indeed, but it is also with confidence and joy, that we "work out our own salvation."

The promises of Divine aid, to those who desire it, are numerous and express. "Ask and ye shall receive, seek and ye shall find, knock and it shall be opened unto you.""-" All things, whatsoever ye ask in prayer, believing, ye shall receive.”—“ Those who come unto me, I will in no wise cast out."-" If a son shall ask bread of any of you that is a father, will he give him a stone? Or if he ask a fish, will he for a fish give him a serpent? Or if he ask an egg will he offer him a scorpion? If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to them that ask him?"

These, and many other promises, give to the believer hope and confidence. He is assured, that "what the law could not do in that it was weak through the flesh, is accomplished by Him who came in the likeness of sinful

flesh," and who has declared that his grace is sufficient for those who trust in it. It was this which supported Saint Paul when, deeply affected by the perverseness of his fallen nature, he exclaimed, "O wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me from the body of this death!" and, immediately checking himself, he exclaimed, "I thank God, through Jesus Christ our Lord! There is now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, who walk not after the flesh, but after the spirit.” These sentiments breathe the very spirit of our Christian faith ; and it is thus that "he who humbleth himself is exalted;" and Divine strength is made perfect in human weakness.

ELEVENTH WEEK-MONDAY.

ARCHITECTURE.-ITS ANCIENT HISTORY AND PRACTICE-ROME.

THE genius of the Romans became ascendant, as that of the Greeks decayed. That most wonderful people, from small and even contemptible beginnings, rose, by their extraordinary energy and military prowess, accompanied with a noble and even romantic patriotism, to be rulers of the world. When Rome arrived at the height of its power, it contained, within its single precincts, the élite of the population and the wealth, of many districts. Its private citizens, going out as governors of provinces which had once been empires, after having, in their respective governments, exercised despotic power, and reigned in regal state, returned home with all the riches of which they had stripped those whom they ruled, and lived as individuals with the income of monarchs.

Thus, there gradually arose in Rome a demand for buildings, both public and private, on a scale such as the world had never as yet beheld. The conquerors not only concentrated the wealth, but the ingenuity of the subju

gated nations into the one imperial city, or diffused them over their limited native territory. Whatever was grand or luxurious, elegant or useful, in the vast range of their conquests, that active and inquisitive people noted and transferred to Italy, and there reproduced them on a scale of magnificence which far surpassed the originals. Aqueducts, bridges, forums, basilicas, temples, baths, theatres, amphitheatres, stadia, hippodromes, and naumachia, rendered the Capital of the world the aggregate of all that was wonderful and useful throughout the whole extent of her mighty empire.

"It were an endless task," says Mr Hope, "to recite the constructions, so well adapted to every useful purpose, for every object of magnificence reared within, or in the immediate vicinity of Rome,―aqueducts of prodigious length, which, from the adjacent mountains, carried in every direction streams of the clearest water across its vast plain into its inmost bosom; sewers of indestructible solidity, which again carried away every species of impurity; roads, as indestructible as ours are perishable, which, from the capital, diverged on every side to the utmost confines of the peninsula; and on these roads, bridges massy and durable, which joined the opposite banks of the widest rivers; forums or public porticos, where its population might meet and converse sheltered from heat and rain, increased in the time of Augustus to the number of forty-five, and which, under Trajan, received the addition of that forum in which stood his triumphal column, surrounded by a forest of other pillars of granite of a single block of immense height and diameter; baths erected by Augustus, by Nero, by Titus, by Caracalla, and by Diocletian, each containing all that could serve for cleanliness, for health, for exercise, and for amusement, each seeming a palace in splendour, and a city in size, and still by their ruins astonishing the world; basilicas for the administration of justice and the dispatch of business, vast and superb beyond description; and even shambles so sumptuous,

that, on a medal of Nero appears a building inscribed · Macellum Augusti,' which, from the richness of its columns, might be mistaken for an amphitheatre; the Circus Maximus for races, whose incredible size and magnificence, prevented not several others, little inferior to it, from successively arising; the amphitheatre of Vespasian, computed to contain 109,000 spectators, of which, after one half had been pulled down in 1084 by the Norman Guiscard, lest it should be used as a citadel against him, and the other half had furnished the Popes with materials with which to build the palaces of Farnese, of St. Mark, and of the Cancellaria, the remains have struck with amazement the beholders of every successive age; the mausolea of Augustus, of Adrian, and others; the gorgeous palaces of the emperors; the temples without number; the triumphal arches, the architraves, piers, cornices, acroteria of the richest granite, porphyries, and marble, such as to bewilder the imagination that pictures to itself the buildings to which they belonged, rising spontaneously, like plants, wherever in a fruitful soil we thrust a spade. Not less remarkable were the buildings, erected in every province far and near. Amphitheatres at Verona, in Cisalpine Gaul, at Arles, and Nismes, and Vienne beyond the Alps, and at Pola on the Dalmatian shore, almost as stupendous as the Coliseum itself; Asia Minor, adorned by Augustus with several temples of the largest dimensions; Athens itself, endowed by Adrian with a temple of Jupiter Olympius, behind which the loftiest monument of the times of her independence that consecrated by Pericles to Minerva-hid its diminished head; Antioch doubled from what it was under its kings; and Alexandria made, in the column which is called of Pompey, to forget the lesser prodigality of its Ptolemies; a temple of the sun at Balbeck, of which the mere base contained three stones, measuring from back to front, exclusive of the bold and rich cornice, ten feet five inches, from top to bottom thirteen feet, and collectively, from end to end, a hun

dred and ninety-nine feet; buildings equally astonishing, raised in the Decapolis of Palestine, and in the cities on the coast of Africa, and others not less splendid, erected in different parts of Spain; the bridge on the Danube, and the Pont-du-Gard in Gaul; the prodigious moles of different sea-ports; the gates of Arles, Nismes, Narbonne, Autun, and other cities innumerable, and even in a place scarce noticed in history, at Orange, one of the largest theatres known, and traces of an amphitheatre, and stadium, and naumachia, so stupendous that we can only account for its construction in that situation, by supposing that the spot was one where the whole population of the surrounding provinces met periodically for purposes of festivity."*

This splendid sketch contains, after all, but a faint view of the magnificence and extent of Roman architecture, on which, however, though the subject is tempting, I must not further dilate. But there are peculiarities which distinguished both the style of architecture of this era, and the purposes to which it was directed from those of preceding ages, which require a short notice.

In the style, the radical difference in principle was the introduction of the arch, which, as I have already observed, if not wholly unknown, was at least but little employed, by more ancient nations. I have already alluded to the restricted span of architecture in stone, when debarred of the use of the arch; and it will not be difficult to understand the vast new resources and powers derived from that discovery. Pillars and walls placed so far asunder, that no blocks of stone or beams of wood can connect them, may, by the arch, be embraced and combined. An area so spacious, that no flat ceiling could cover it, may, by the vault, be closed in with equal solidity and durability. By means of the vault the expense of cutting, of carrying, of raising masses of immense height, only to produce small intervening spaces, may be avoided. A less quantity of ma

* Hope on Architecture, pp. 56-59.