PRIMITIVE CHRISTIANITY.*

THERE are some ages when all seem to look for a great man to come up at God's call, and deliver them from the evils they groan under. Then Humanity seems to lie with its forehead in the dust, calling on Heaven to send a man to save it. There are times when the powers of the race, though working with their wonted activity, appear so misdirected, that little permanent good comes from the efforts of the gifted; times when governments have little regard for the welfare of the subject, when popular forms of religion have lost their hold on the minds of the thoughtful, and the consecrated augurs, while performing the accustomed rites, dare not look one another in the face, lest they laugh in public, and disturb the reverence of the people, their own having gone long before. Times there are, when the popular religion does not satisfy the hunger and thirst of the people themselves. Then mental energy seems of little value, save to disclose and chronicle the sadness of the times. No great works of deep and wide utility are then undertaken for existing or future generations. Original works of art are not sculptured out of new thought. Men fall back on the achievements of their fathers; imitate and reproduce them, but take no steps in any direction into the untrodden infinite. Though wealth and selfishness pile up their marble and mortar as never before, yet the chisel, the pencil, and the pen, are prostituted to imitation. The artist does not travel beyond the actual. At such times, the rich are wealthy, only to be luxurious, and dissolve the mind in the lusts of the flesh. The cultivated have skill and taste, only to mock, openly or in secret, at the forms of religion, and its substance also; to devise new

* From the Dial for January, 1842.

pleasures for themselves; pursue the study of some abortive science, some costly game, or dazzling art. When the people suffer for water and bread, the king digs fishpools, that his parasites may fare on lampreys of unnatural size. Then the poor are trodden down into the dust. The weak bear the burden of the strong, and they who do all the work of the world, who spin, and weave, and delve, and drudge, who build the palace, and supply the feast, are the only men that go hungry and bare, live uncared for, and when they die are huddled into the dirt, with none to say GOD BLESS YOU. Such periods have occurred

several times in the world's history.

At these times man stands in frightful contrast with nature. He is dissatisfied, ill-fed, and poorly clad; while all nature through, there is not an animal, from the mite to the mammoth, but his wants are met and his peace secured by the great Author of all. Man knows not whom to trust, while the little creature that lives its brief moment in the dew-drop, which hangs on the violet's petal, enjoys perfect tranquillity so long as its little life runs on. Man is in doubt, distress, perpetual trouble; afraid to go forward, lest he go wrong; fearful of standing still, lest he fall; while the meanest worm, that crawls under his feet, is all and enjoys all its nature allows, and the stars overhead go smoothly as ever on their way.

At such times, men call for a great man, who can put himself at the head of their race, and lead them on, free from their troubles. There is a feeling in the heart of us all, that as sin came by man, and death by sin, so by man, under Providence, must come also Salvation from that sin, and Resurrection from that death. We feel, all of us, that for every wrong there is a right somewhere, had we but the skill to find it. This call for a great man is sometimes long and loud, before he comes, for he comes not of man's calling but of God's appointment.

This was the state of mankind many centuries ago, before Jesus was born at Bethlehem. Scarce ever had there

been an age when a deliverer was more needed. The world was full of riches. Wealth flowed into the cities, a Pactolian tide. Fleets swam the ocean. The fields were full of cattle and corn. The high-piled warehouses at Alexandria and Corinth groaned with the munitions of luxury,

the product of skilful hands. Delicate women, the corrupted and the corrupters of the world's metropolis, scarce veiled their limbs in garments of gossamer, fine as woven wind. Metals and precious stones vied with each other to render loveliness more lovely, and beauty more attractive, or oftener to stimulate a jaded taste, and whip the senses to their work. Nature, with that exquisite irony men admire but cannot imitate-used the virgin lustre of the gem, to reveal more plain the moral ugliness of such as wore the gaud. The very marble seemed animate to bud and blossom into palace and temple. But alas for man in those days! The strong have always known one part of their duty, how to take care of themselves; and so have laid burthens on weak men's shoulders; but the more difficult part, how to take care of the weak, their natural clients, they neither knew nor practised so well even as now. If the history of the strong is ever written, as such, it will be the record of rapine and murder, from Cain to Cush, from Nimrod to Napoleon.

In that age men cried for a great man, and wonderful to tell, the prophetic spirit of human nature, which detects events in their causes, and by its profound faith in the invisible, sees both the cloud and the star, before they come up to the horizon, foretold the advent of such a man. "An ancient and settled opinion," says a Roman writer, "had spread over all the East, that it was fated at this time for some one to arise out of Judea, and rule the world." We find this expectation in many shapes, psalm and song, poem and prophecy. We sometimes say this prediction was miraculous, while it appears rather as the natural forecast of hearts, which believe God has a remedy for each disease, and balm for every wound. The expectation of relief is deep and certain with such, just as the evil is imminent and dreadful. If it have lasted long and spread wide, men only look for a greater man. This fact shows how deep in the soul lies that religious element, which sees clearest in the dark, when understanding cannot see at all; which hopes most, when there is least ground, but most need of hope. But men go too far in their expectations. Their faith stimulates their fancy, which foretells what the deliverer shall be. In this, men are always mistaken. Heaven has endowed the race of men with but little inven

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tion. So in those times of trouble, they look back to the last peril, and hope for a redeemer like him they had before; greater it may be, but always of the same kind. This same poverty of invention and habit of thinking the future must reproduce the past, appears in all human calculations. If some one had told the amanuensis of Julius Cæsar, that in eighteen centuries men would be able in a few hours to make a perfect copy of a book twenty times as great as all his master's commentaries and history, he would pronounce it impossible; for he could think of none but the old method of a scribe forming each word with a pen, letter by letter; never anticipating the modern way of printing with a rolling press driven by steam. some one had told Joab, that two thousand years after his day, men in war would kill one another with a missile half an ounce in weight, and would send it three or four hundred yards, driving it through a shirt of mail, or a ploughshare of iron, he would think but of a common bow and arrows, and say it cannot be. What would Zeuxis have thought of a portrait made in thirty seconds, exact as nature, pencilled by the Sun himself? Now men make mistakes in their expectation of a deliverer. The Jews were once raised to great power by David, and again rescued from distress and restored from exile by Cyrus, a great conqueror and a just man. Therefore the next time they fell into trouble, they expected another king like David, or Cyrus, who should come, perhaps in the clouds, with a great army to do much more than either David or Cyrus had done. This was the current expectation, that when the Redeemer came, he should be a great general, commander of an army, King of the Jews. He was to restore the exiles, defeat their foes, and revive the old theocracy, to which other nations should be subservient.

Their deliverer comes; but instead of a noisy general, a king begirt with the pomp of oriental royalty, there appears one of the lowliest of men. His kingdom was of truth, and therefore not of this world. He drew no sword; uttered no word of violence; did not complain when persecuted, but took it patiently; did not exact a tooth for a tooth, nor pay a blow with a blow, but loved men who hated him. This conqueror, who was to come with great pomp, perhaps in the clouds, with an army numerous as

the locusts, at whose every word kingdoms were to shake -appears; born in a stable; of the humblest extraction; the companion of fishermen, living in a town whose inhabitants were so wicked, men thought nothing good could come of it. The means he brought for the salvation of his race were quite as surprising as the Saviour himself; not armies on earth, or in heaven; not even new tables of laws; but a few plain directions, copied out from the primitive and eternal Scripture God wrote in the heart of man,-the true Protevangelium,-LOVE MAN; LOVE GOD; RESIST EVIL; ASK AND RECEIVE. These were the weapons with which to pluck the oppressor down from his throne; to destroy the conquerors of the world; dislodge sin from high places and low places; uplift the degraded, and give weary and desperate human nature a fresh start! How disappointed men would have looked, could it have been made clear to them, that this was now the only deliverer Heaven was sending to their rescue. But this could not be; their recollection of past deliverance, and their prejudice of the future based on this recollection, blinded their eyes. They said, "This is not he; when the Christ cometh, no man shall know whence he is. But we know this is the Nazarene carpenter, the Son of Joseph and Mary." Men treated this greatest of Saviours as his humble brothers had always been treated. Even his disciples were not faithful; one betrayed him with a kiss; the rest forsook him and fled; his enemies put him to death, adding ignominy to their torture, and little thinking this was the most effectual way to bring about the end he sought, and scatter the seed, whence the whole race was to be blessed for many a thousand years.

There is scarce anything in nature more astonishing to a reflective mind, than the influence of one man's thought and feeling over another, and on thousands of his fellows. There are few voices in the world, but many echoes, and so the history of the world is chiefly the rise and progress of the thoughts and feelings of a few great men. Let a man's outward position be what it may, that of a slave or a king, or an apparent idler in a busy metropolis, if he have more wisdom, love, and religion than any of his fellow-mortals, their mind, heart, and soul are put in motion, even against their will, and they cannot stand where they stood before,