Asyncritus, Phlegon, Hermas, Patrobas, Hermes, Philologus, Julia, Nercas, and his sister, and Olympas, and all the saints, that are with them." What a goodly company is this, and how highly favored! St. Paul loves them, blesses them, commands them! They were chief saints of a church whose faith and obedience were known throughout the world. Scarcely anything is known of any of them, except what is here recorded, that they were faithful and laborious disciples of the Saviour, and beloved brethren of St. Paul.

How profoundly affecting it is to think of this group, and their fellow-disciples; a holy seed of many nations and many stations in life, in the midst of this then vast, magnificent, and awfully wicked city, enjoying temporary peace and toleration, at the beginning of the reign of Nero, soon to be followed by persecution, when he should have surrendered himself to debauchery, cruelty, wild extravagance, and frenzied dissipation! Doubtless, many of them were subsequently enrolled in the noble army of martyrs. As St. Paul contemplated them in their insecure position, living and walking under the shadow of that imperial palace from which at any moment of capricious passion the mandate might issue for their extermination; and living near the amphitheaters and circuses in which the clamors of a brutal and blood-fed populace might soon demand that they should be given to the lions; when he remembered that they were set for a light in that dark place, it is not surprising that he put so much heart into his salutations, and so tenderly names his beloved brethren one by one. No wonder that his earnestness is so fervent, when he guards them from

error, and leads them into truth, and exhorts them to duty. He would have them strong in the Lord; he would have their light shine; he would have them fitted for the high position assigned them of soon becoming the most conspicuous of the churches. They would need to put on the whole armor of God. They would need the most vigorous and heroic spiritual development. Christian athletes, they required to be fed with strong meats, and to be girded with power. They must learn to comprehend, and live upon, and cling to the most essential and vital truths; and they must be taught to shun the errors which would corrupt their faith, or chill their love, or misguide their zeal. Such was the task before the Apostle. It was accomplished in his great Epistle. We have reason to believe that it was accepted and did its work. We know that its truths were reiterated by St. Clement, called, in the Roman succession, the third Bishop of Rome. We know what faithful testimony was given by the Roman martyrs. The Roman Church adopted and lived upon and disseminated the truths so earnestly inculcated by St. Paul.

The Church of Rome still exists. A Bishop of Rome occupies the see which seems not to have been constituted, or at least occupied, at the time in which St. Paul wrote his Epistle. A few months since he proclaimed the sorrow which he felt at the palpable decay of faith, the spread of practical irreligion and of speculative infidelity, throughout Italy and the world. He addressed to the faithful animated exhortations to second his efforts to win back the favor of God, and to revive faith and sanctity in the minds of men. We know, from St. Paul's Epistle, what

exhortations he would have addressed to the saints in Rome at such a crisis. He would have exhorted them to earnest prayer to the Father through the Son, for the converting, reviving, and sanctifying power of the Holy Ghost to be poured out upon priests and people. He would have reminded them of their high privileges as the freely forgiven children of God, by faith in Christ Jesus; and of the obligation, through the constraining love of Christ, to live holily and unblamably, and in a spirit of true consecration to God, and love to man. Were these, or similar exhortations, addressed by the Bishop of Rome to the saints that are in Rome? Not these, but other exhortations were employed. They were enjoined with their presence and faith and prayer to attend a spectacle, for healing the evils of the times and propitiating the favor of Heaven. A picture of the Saviour would be carried by Pope and cardinals, priests and monks, with banner and music and incense and the pomp of gilded vestments, from the Basilica of St. John Lateran to that of Santa Maria Maggiore. It was this picture in which the hope of the restoration of faith and holiness seemed to be reposed. It was said to have been outlined by St. Luke for the Virgin Mary, three days after Christ's ascension; to have been miraculously colored in the night; to have been carried during the siege of Titus to Pella and subsequently to Constantinople; to have been taken away in the seventh century by the persecuted Bishop of Constantinople, and consigned to the sea, over which it passed, in a perpendicular position, to Ostia, in twenty-four hours, when, seeing the Pope ready to receive it upon shore, it

rose and placed itself in his hands. The Bishop of Rome's method of reviving faith and religion was the transfer of this picture from the Basilica of St. John Lateran to that of Santa Maria Maggiore. It evidently differs from the method which would have been adopted by St. Paul. He knew of no such means of grace.*

And the tokens of divine favor which have followed this act of faith are also of such a kind as would not have been appreciated by St. Paul. In the little town of Vico Varo, in the Sabine Mountains, in a miniature chapel, I saw, last spring, a picture of the Virgin Mary. It seems that this picture has for some months been in the habit of rolling up its eyes, and changing perceptibly its color. This is received as evidence that the Virgin Mary has heard the supplications of the faithful, and that she will intercede with her Son to intercede with the Father to avert the evils which threaten the Church of Rome and the world, and to bestow upon them anew his blessing. Another picture in the same region makes the same miraculous manifestations. Homage to a pic

* All the statements above mentioned, elaborately and diffusely narrated, are found in a printed document, scattered all over Rome at the time of the exposition of the picture, entitled "Origine della S. Imagine,” and concluding with the words, "Con permesso." The crowds who attended its transfer and its exposition were immense. During the last days the press of people toward the picture, with rosaries, crosses, jewels, handkerchiefs, books, and other articles, kept two priests constantly employed in touching them to the glass in front, by which a miraculous virtue was supposed to be imparted to them; and the Swiss guard could with difficulty keep the crowd back from the altar. The exposition continued from the 6th to the 13th of September. (1862.)

The eyes are not only rolled up and down, but sometimes move sideways, and occasionally the eyelashes also move.

ture of the Saviour, painted by St. Luke, to act as the effectual prayer; and pictures of the Madonna, that roll their eyes up and down, and occasionally sideways, with a movement of the eyelids, as answers to the prayer, this is the method of seeking and proclaiming spiritual blessing adopted by the present Church of Rome. It was a method evidently unknown to St. Paul.*

In view of these new methods of the Church of Rome, it is scarcely necessary to ask if the truths which St. Paul so earnestly labored to implant have lived and thriven and borne holy fruits where they were so early introduced? Alas! there is not one of them which the Church of Rome accepts. There is not one of them which she does not reject. Justification by faith only, over which holy Paul lifted a glowing anthem, Rome visits with anathema. How is it with the errors against which St. Paul so strenuously labored? Rome adopts them. She preaches the merit which Paul denounced. And what in the place of Paul's fundamentals are hers? Dogmas of which there is not the shadow of a trace in his Epistle. The supremacy of St. Peter and his Vicarate of Christ, Transubstantiation, the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin, and--but why should I name them? Of all these fundamental dogmas, we find in the Epistle of St. Paul, intended to be the chart and guide of the Church of Rome through all time, that there is not a word-not a word! Simply to state such a fact is more impressive than

* It is a significant comment on this miracle, that the vicar of the parish at Vico Varo, who wrote glowing accounts of this miraculous manifestation, has since absconded with all the offerings of the faithful.