She likewise was Gentiles has gained the crown. She had her Socrates whose wisdom has faded before that of the Nazarene; she had brains, but no heart. Rome, too, had her place and her hour. weighed and found wanting. diverging from the golden milestone, were lost in distant lands. Her eagles were the world's terror. Like Babylon of old, she sat a queen. The Star of Bethlehem shone on her fields. Her Herod was John the Baptist's assassin. The sandalled feet of the Christ trod her acres. The transfiguration glinted her domain. The Christ stood before her Pilate for his sentence. Roman Roman soldiers gamRome was silent when law sanctioned his death. bled for his seamless coat. Jewish hatred plaited the crown of thorns, and put a worthless reed into the sacred hand for a sceptre. Brutal laughter greeted each act in that solemn farce; but in his hand there is a sceptre; on his forehead there is a crown, and before Him the world bends its knee. Paganism and Judaism were merry when they clothed Him in scarlet, but the robe they threw over Him became their own winding sheet. IV. THE BOOK OF LIBERTY. THE two master ideas in all beneficent movements have been God and Liberty; such was the teaching of Everett, that peer among scholars, orators and statesmen. We do not repeat the influence resultant upon our conception of the divine character; nor can we imagine a history in which battalions of warriors or multitudes of scholars have availed in keeping off from human events God's disposing hand. God is not dead; nor does He need human defenders. It would not withdraw from the power of these two ideas, should we refer to the history of human progress as the work of God himself elevating man step by step into liberty; but lest an assumption of the relations between the divine and the human be called begging the question, we turn again to the Book and its teachings in three particulars; upon slavery, the elevation of woman, and the dignity of labor. I. Slavery. Liberty means more than the right to live; it means absolute freedom from any outside and unjust restraint. Liberty is man's normal state, and yet few have kept it. The history of mankind has largely been that of servitude. The lives of all ancient Egypt were in the keeping of her Pharaohs; the pyramids are monuments of the imperial despotism. Ancient Greece exalted slavery in her laws and by her philosophers. Some of the brightest authors of Greece were slaves ; and the same was true of Rome. Terence, Epictetus, Publius Syrus and other classic writers were slaves. Some of the most eminent of her sculptors, physicians and architects were of the same class. It is a travesty on humanity when in the camp of Lucullus, at Pontus, men were sold for the value in our money of sixty-two cents each. The Gallic wars alone of Julius Cæsar added almost half a million slaves to the empire. The magnitude of every conquest was marked by the number of captives in the conqueror's train. Rome in the hight of her power owned slaves from every known nation. The old civilization up to the time of Christianity rested upon slavery as a central fact. There were more slaves than freemen in Greece. Gibbon in his monumental history counts the popu lation of the Roman empire at one hundred and twenty millions, of whom one half or sixty millions were slaves. The hopelessness of such a state of society beggars description. It was the fruit of despair. The slave market was like the cattle market. Slaves were not counted as persons, only as property. They were branded with searing irons on their breasts. Plutarch records of the Roman Flaminius that he put a slave to death in order to show a guest what are the agonies of death, because the guest had never seen a man die. For breaking a vase another was hacked into pieces and his body thrown to the fishes. Slaves were crucified by hundreds, that their brutal masters might gloat upon their sufferings and tortures. One island in the Tiber was set apart for aged and worn-out slaves, where without care they should die. These same ideas obtained to some extent among the Hebrews. Debtors unable to fulfill their promises passed into servitude, even as did thieves to make restitution; but at the end of seven years' servitude every one was to become free; while every fiftieth year was a jubilee year of general emancipation of native slaves. The teachings of Moses are more of liberty than of slavery. With a higher ideal than in all other nations, there was yet a general truth in the words of the Jews to Christ: "We were never in bondage to any man." True, their very political history had begun in Egyptian slavery; once and again they had fallen captive to some conquering nation, yet these were the temporary conditions rather than the perma nent state. We shall note the influence of Christian doctrines upon the nations leading up to liberty; yet we pause to parallel the Jewish Scriptures with the Hebrew life. Freedom is that absence of all outside imposed restraint either upon mind or body. Paul's imprisonments did not fetter his soul. England cast Hampden into a dungeon; yet that dungeon's stifled air could not repress or overcome his obedience to conscience alone. The despot's shackles may chafe the freest man's wrists. In darker centuries, some of the world's best men have been imprisoned or fettered or exiled. In this sense, we regard liberty as that state in which the spirit of man is undaunted by all outside imperialism. We are not to ask whether the Bible has insured its adherents against imprisonments or death; but rather, what qualities does the Book inspire and |