saints or divinities. Both nations, the Chinese and American, will owe a supreme debt of gratitude to Dr. Williams for a lifelong effort to create a mutual understanding and a Christian good-will that shall affect the welfare of millions.

China's second great philosopher, Mencius, said: "There is no attribute of a great man greater than his helping other men to practice virtue." And again: "A wise man is the teacher of a hundred generations."

ART. VIII. SOME

ASPECTS OF THE EPISTLE TO
THE ROMANS.

THE declaration of the apostle, made somewhat incidentally, that the advent of Christ was at "the fullness of time," sets forth a fact of far-reaching import. Many learned men, uniting the offices of the scholar and the artist, have delighted to picture to the imagination the expectant world waiting for the Coming One: some, in the clear vision of prophecy; some, in unconscious aspirations and groanings, as they who wait for the morning, looking with untiring hope for the long-looked for deliverance; many more, caring only for their present pursuits and pleasures, but unconsciously "building better than they knew," were bringing about that order of things in human affairs which should best subserve the purposes of the divine providence respecting the establishment of Christ's kingdom among men. The incarnation took place, as to the earthward side, long ages after it was called for by the apostasy, and promised by God himself to fallen man. Nor is this long delay an altogether inexplicable mystery. A train of preparatory processes for that great event is plainly traceable; and as Christ came not only to suffer and die for man's redemption, but also to reveal God's will, and to inaugurate the dispensation of the Gospel among men, the condition in which the world should be found at and closely following his coming was a matter of the highest importance.

Among the several items enumerated by the pen of inspiration, as contained in "the mystery of godliness," is the twofold fact that it was "preached among the Gentiles" and "believed

on in the world ;" and of all the wonderful things about the Gospel's career, its conquest of the Roman Empire, and its dominance of the whole western world in less than three hundred years from its first promulgation, is perhaps to human appearances the most wonderful. The purpose of this initial study respecting one of the greatest events in the promulgation of the Gospel and its acceptance-the preparation and publication of the Epistle to the Romans-shall be to make a survey of the situation of the world at that time. The subject is not an occult one, for scarcely to any other age has the Muse of History ever been so partial, and yet it is a very broad field, and our survey of it must be both general and hasty.

The world at that time, so far as seen either in sacred or profane history, was simply the Roman Empire. The flight of the Roman eagle was from the Euphrates to the Atlantic, and from the Danube to the Great Sahara; and there was none to challenge his authority. Roman arms then held the unwilling peoples in quiet subjection; and Roman law, which always followed in the footsteps of the conquering legions, was everywhere present, decreeing equal justice to all free subjects, and bearing the sword not in vain-not (to such) as "a terror to good works, but to the evil"--and enforcing peace and order among the (until now) hostile and belligerent nations. The Divinity that rules in human affairs had "made wars to cease;" so that even martial Rome rested from conquest and slaughter. The world as then known was a single consolidated empire, under a sole imperial power, and subject generally to the same laws; and the empire was at peace.

The career of conquest by which Rome had become mistress of the world, and its empire world-wide, had also enriched all Italy with the spoils of the vanquished nations. Gradually, through more than seven hundred years, the nations of the world had been contributing of their most valued treasures for the enriching of the city on the Tiber, and steadily, through all these years, the Roman people had been advancing in all the forms of natural greatness. Theirs were the harvests of the most distant fields; the gold and silver, the pearls and precious stones of the whole world, gravitated to the banks of the Tiber; and the arts of Egypt and Assyria and Persia, and, beyond all others, of Greece, had found their resting-place in Rome.

And with their works of art came also the artists to teach their conquerors, and to naturalize taste and culture on Italian soil. Rome itself, within its twenty miles of circumvallations, was at the time of the advent a vast aggregation of palaces, the home of luxury such as, happily for us, is unknown in our times; and all Italy was a region of villas, and gardens, and pleasure grounds, while its smaller cities rivaled the metropolis in wealth, culture, luxury, and debauchery. The cessation of wars had given opportunity for the pursuits of peace, and the Augustan age ensued, with all that we seek to express by that name; which, however, in its reality, entirely outstripped men's largest conceptions. Wealth and luxury demand the service of menials, and accordingly Rome swarmed with slaves, who made up numerically the greater proportion of her millions of peoples. These were chiefly prisoners of war; often the ablest, the most learned and cultured, of the desolated and despoiled nations; and now they served their masters with their learning and genius as scholars and artists, and in all the learned professions; and, despite their condition, they constituted a not inconsiderable social element. And besides these, there was the Roman populace-a vast multitude of idle, effeminate, and pleasure-loving men and women, who lived only to indulge their passions and lusts, and their worse than brutish impulses, and to whom the government distributed its daily dole of provisions, and for whom it maintained, at untold cost, theatrical displays, athletic sports, and gladiatorial shows. Such was the city of Rome of the first Christian century.

But in the midst of this every-where manifest material splendor-this idleness, effeminacy, and pleasure-seeking-there was no lack of learning, and of deep and broad and elevating thought. The more earnest tendencies of the period took the forms of Platonism and Stoicism, while an equally learned and scarcely less thoughtful class accepted the philosophy of the Epicureans, who, believing nothing and hoping for nothing but what might befall them in the blind happenings of fortune, made it their wisdom to seize the pleasure of the passing hour, regardless alike of the claims of an ideal right or the recompenses of the absolutely uncertain future. The Stoics were the highest type of Romans, learned, thoughtful, and proud;

worshipers of virtue according to their conception of it, sensible of the emptiness of what men usually call pleasure, with a blind intuition of the right, and of obligation to conform to its demands, and thoroughly possessed of an egoistical contempt for the vulgar herds of humanity. This people were without a properly defined religious faith; their god was little more than an unknown force, and the future life was for them simply an aspiration and a dream, and man himself was in effect only an atom drifting helplessly upon the flood of the ages, without the power to choose his way or to determine his own destiny, but wholly subject to FATE. The Platonists were Grecian rather than Roman, as to the source of their doctrines, and also as to their modes of thinking, but their school had become widely established in Rome. They were idealists, affecting especially subjective meditations and speculations. They were theists, because they inferred, logically, that existence implies an originating cause, and therefore before all existences must be an ultimate First Cause, which they named GOD. But because he was essentially unknown, and indeed unknowable, though he might be made the object of the most exalted contemplation, his distance from all conditioned things rendered him unfit to be an object of worship, and therefore their religious instincts went out to secondary divinities. Their moral ideals were dreamy, indefinite, and uncertain; so that necessarily their system was without authority over their lower impulses; yet were they self-opinionated, and in thought luxurious, selfish, and indolent, and so without moral stamina, and quite unable to redeem others.

The religion of the Roman Empire was, apart from the Jewish element, a universal idolatry, of many forms and ethnic varieties, and yet with a broad and deep unity of character. Comparative mythology readily detects this essential unity beneath the many varieties seen in various countries. Its original element was a naturalism, which was somewhat formulated in both Egypt and Syria, and being brought from both of these countries into Greece, it was there wrought into an elaborate mythology, partly in the form of philosophical symbols, but chiefly in poetic fables and stories of the exploits of the gods, which were not expected to be believed. The gods of the Grecian Olympus were essentially anthropological,

endowed with vast physical powers but without intellectual greatness, and entirely depraved morally. This was the recognized religion, as to both creed and cultus, of the Roman Empire; and though it was the policy of Rome to allow each conquered nation to retain its own religion, yet there was among nearly all of them substantially the same mythology and similar religious forms.

But through all this was diffused another and essentially diverse religious element. When God separated a single nation for himself, according to his covenant with Abraham, he seems to have abandoned all the rest of the world, and given them over to their own folly; and thus left to themselves they turned away from seeking after God, and become vain in their imaginations, and their foolish hearts were darkened. This was evidently one side of the process of the work of preparation for the bringing in of the Gospel, of which the history of the chosen people presented the counterpart. For two thousand years the Gentile mind had been allowed to pursue its own course, not, indeed, without providential oversight, nor absolutely without spiritual guidance, but practically it was allowed to grope its way and to work out its own designs, and the result is concisely but comprehensively summed up in the saying, "The world by wisdom knew not God." And now this godlessness of thought had run its course and matured its fruit-a deep and all-embracing darkness of mind and heart, intellectual agnosticism, and an overmastering moral depravity of spirit. Men had turned away from God, and made gods for themselves; and God had given them up to work out their own evil purposes; and while they thus "changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshiped and served the creature more than the Creator," the deep native depravity of their hearts had opportunity to develop itself in all forms of monstrous vices and corruptions.

It is quite impossible for us, who have happily never become used to such fearful shapes of matured depravity, to form an adequate conception of the terrible moral corruption of heathen Rome during the early Christian centuries. A glance at it is given in the first chapter of the Epistle to the Romans, but only such as to awaken inquiry rather than to clearly state the case. But the subject is not an occult one. It can be learned