law, under the radiant climate of Ionia, earth's paradise, uttering ever wise sayings in their golden language, the countrymen of Socrates were dwindling away into self-inflicted extinction. Not from human reason could Augustus hope that the restoration of the family might come.

Turn to Rome, the centre of his power, whose history had been the embodiment of practical good sense, unbending perseverance of will, perfect discipline. Civilisation had struck with a mortal blight the old Roman domestic virtues. The poor Etruscan, Sabine, or Latin tribe had reverenced female chastity, and guarded its hearth as the most precious of earthly goods, the fire which was never to be extinguished. In those days woman could die rather than survive the infringement of the single marriage. But now when the Roman emperors furnish us with many a Tarquin, the Roman matrons of the empire yield no Lucretia. None had tested the matter closer than Augustus himself. How was he to recover what had perished? How to reverse the sentence of his own

courtier-poet?

"Etas parentum pejor avis tulit

Nos nequiores, mox daturos
Progeniem vitiosiorem."

If the emperor tried to improve morality by imposing fines, he knew probably better than any one else what was likely to act on Roman minds.

But Spain and Gaul, Libya and Egypt, Syria

and Asia, was there any thing in their laws or manners inspiring hope for the future? In the West Roman civilisation was spreading its own immorality. As to the East it was doubtful whether the gods or the vices of these nations were the most dangerous to the well-being of society. To Rome, as to the central point of empire, streamed all their corruptions; and its rulers strove in vain to keep out Isis and Cybele, and the hideous forms of men and women which lurked behind their darkness-loving shrines. Hear the poet:

"I cannot rule my spleen and calmly see

A Grecian capital in Italy:

Grecian ah no; with this vast sewer compared
The dregs of Greece are scarcely worth regard.
Long since the stream that wanton Syria laves
Has disembogued its filth in Tiber's waves,
Its language, arts, o'erwhelm'd us with the scum
Of Antioch's streets, its minstrel, harp, and drum.
Hie to the circus, ye who want to prove

A barbarous mistress, an outlandish love.
Hie to the circus! there in crowds they stand,
Tires on their head, and timbrels in their hand.

While every land,

Sicyon, and Amydos, and Alaband,

Tralles, and Samos, and a thousand more,

Thrive on our indolence, and daily pour

Their starving myriads forth; hither they come,
And batten on the genial soil of Rome,

Minions, then lords, of every princely dome."

There was no moral strength in these dissolving nations of which the utmost foresight could avail itself, to reinvigorate a corrupt people.

But what if Augustus ever turned his glance on those outlying barbarians of the North, who,

* Juvenal, iii. 95-115, Gifford's translation.

amid their uncivilised virtues, had retained from the ancient heir-loom of man regard and respect for the female sex? Probably Augustus did not even know the peculiarity which Tacitus pointed out. They acted on his empire only as a threatening war-cloud, calling ever for the utmost diligence of Roman military discipline to meet its descent. But no Roman eye could discern the power which could detach that single constituent of domestic life from the surrounding cruelty and idolatry, and refine it to be the staple of our modern Christian home.

Let us further add, to aid Augustus in his search, all the minds which have left us a record of themselves from Cicero to Tacitus. There is not one who does not look upon the world's course as a rapid descent. They feel an immense moral corruption breaking in on all sides, which wealth, convenience of life, prosperity, only enhance. They have no hope for humanity; for they have no faith in it, nor in any power encompassing and directing it. Their ancient republican freedom is irrecoverably lost, because the virtues which supported it were gone before. Of any thing higher they have no glimpse. Where were the elements of life in that loveless prospect of power which respected no sanctuary of manhood-of manhood which resisted no temptation of wealth?

But it might seem that we have omitted the one nation from which something might be hoped.

The Jew, believing in the one God, the belief in whom was the sanction of all morality, was every where scattered as a commercial settler over the whole east and west, ready to be the missionary of a new religion, the upholder of a pure morality. Yes; but, on the other hand, he was bitterly unsocial; his married life was scandalous by the license of polygamy and the practice of divorce. Even a century later, St. Justin tells us that he was notorious for carrying off a handsome wife wherever he could find her,* unrestricted by the one he had already. His master passion would seem to the Roman then as now the love of wealth; his marked feature a concentrated national pride. His country was an obscure province, the prey of one foreign conqueror after another, before Augustus had contemptuously left it in Herod's stewardship, until he chose to confiscate it for his own use. The last place in all his empire to which probably Augustus would have looked for means to turn aside that moral ruin which he yet wished to stem, was that distant and very subordinate province. And the last spot in it a deserted cave, sometimes frequented by stray shepherds as a stable, the cave of Bethlehem.

III. Yet from the birth in that cave sprang the great social revolution which reversed the servi

* Dialog. cum Tryphone, s. 141. εἰ συνεχωρεῖτο ἣν βούλεταί τις, καὶ ὡς βούλεται, καὶ ὅσας βούλεται λαμβάνειν γυναῖκας, ὁποῖον πράττουσιν οἱ ἀπὸ τοῦ γένους ὑμῶν ἄνθρωποι, κατὰ πᾶσαν γῆν, ἔνθα ἂν ἐπιδημήσωσιν ἢ προσπεμφθῶσιν, ἀγόμενοι ὀνόματι γάμου γυναίκας, κ.τ.λ.

tude of woman, and enabled her to share in equal degree the restoration of man. The basis of that restoration, as we have seen, was the making known to him afresh his true position as a creature, and the end for which he was intended, and the bestowing on him adequate means to reach that end. The knowledge and the means were both the gift of the Child there born. But as originally woman had been made not independent of man, but his partner, and subordinate to him, so the loss of his position as a creature of God intended for a noble end had told doubly on her. If he had become degraded in his own opinion to the rank of a merely rational animal, without a future, she had become not the partner but the instrument of such an animal's natural wants and desires. The revolution which opened out to him a new and boundless future made her likewise the sharer of it. In the Greek, the Roman, the Persian civilisation, in all the half-civilised races surrounding the empire, whatever rank and consideration woman still retained, she held as wife and as mother, that is, relatively to man, not absolutely. This, indeed, was a necessary result of man's own degradation, who ranked himself as a freeman, or a citizen, or a master, or a conqueror, but not as a human being. Among all these nations, therefore, the idea of woman, not as the mother of his family or the companion of his home, but as the human being, was lost. But when man as such recovered his rank, when the Creator