and festivals consume two-thirds of the working-days of the year, the Sabbath is desecrated by the royal head of the church for the review of his guards; and gardens and markets are opened for the gala. There, too, a Paganized Ecclesiasticism opposes, by fraud and by violence, the reading and the teaching of the Bible in the common tongue;1 and denounces Jonas King as "an imp of the devil spewed upon the shores of Greece from the belly of hell." In the city where Paul proclaimed one supreme and spiritual Jehovah, the alone object of intelligent and believ ing worship, a Christian missionary is mobbed, stoned, impris oned, and threatened with exile, for denying that Mary is fitly styled the mother of God, and entitled to religious veneration; and that a wafer is transformed into God by the incantations of a priest. Mary has usurped the place of Minerva in her own city; and, where the Epicurean and Stoic are forgotten, and the gorgeous idolatry of Greece lies in fragments, an ecclesiastical hierarchy, usurping the name of the church of Christ, and paganized in spirit and in worship, persecutes the faith that Dionysius the Areopagite received at the lips of Paul. And this same Greek Ecclesiasticism rules over fifty millions of souls; and, led by the autocrat of all the Russians, now threatens to overwhelm the freer constitution of the Turk, and to destroy the fruits of Christian missions throughout the eastern world.

Passing on from Athens to JERUSALEM, we there find this same Ecclesiasticism in a fourfold form, still paganized and persecuting, installed over the cross and the sepulchre of our Lord. No Sanhedrim now holds its midnight conclave against the prophet of Nazareth, or in open day incites the mob to the murder of Stephen. No cowardly Pilate condemns the innocent to be crucified. The scourge, the prison, and the cross are gone; but only because the Moslem, not the ecclesiastic, holds the keys of Jerusalem. And even now, by subtlety, the ecclesiastic thwarts the missionary, and has driven him by violence from Bethlehem on the very festival of the birth of Christ. There is wanting only the political power of Pope or Czar, to revive in Jerusalem itself the persecutions of the martyr age. There Paganized Ecclesiasticism, Greek, Latin, Armenian, Copt, kisses

1 Among the books lately seized and proscribed by the Greek ecclesiastics were several consisting entirely of selections from the Holy Scriptures.

The good faith of the Turk, in his protectorate of the holy places, is worthy of all praise. The compact of Suludin is held inviolate.

the stone and kneels before the socket of the cross; venerates images, pictures and relics; worships the Virgin; makes invocation to the saints; adores the sacrifice of the Mass; matches with frenzied zeal the vestal fire from the sepulchre; dispenses its indulgences for sin; exalts itself above all that is called God; and flashes its impotent hate against the meek disciple of the meek and holy One.

The picture of the East as it is, overlying the picture of the East as it was, gives you the fact and the argument of our subject. Have we not justified to you by facts the assertion that, everywhere throughout the Eastern world, a Paganized Ecclesiasticism, centred in Rome and in Athens, and ramified over all Continental Europe and Western Asia, is now the grand antagonism of the Gospel? Where the first missionaries from Antioch preached that Gospel to the subverting of the old idolatry, Ecclesiasticism has usurped the name of Christianity, and has restored the rites and offices, the very images and symbols of Paganism under the baptism of Christ and the symbol of his cross.

Whence comes this stupendous usurpation that has transformed the missionary Christianity of Antioch into the Paganized Ecclesiasticism of Rome, of Athens, and of Jerusalem; that rules the consciences of two hundred millions of our race; and that on every soil confronts the missionary with its subtle and deadly hostility? What is the secret of its growth and strength? How shall this antagonism, unknown to Barnabas and Paul, be met by those who shall follow in their track? No question at this day is so important to a Society of Missionary Inquiry; and if, by picturing the strength, the ubiquity, and the resources of this adversary, we shall stimulate your minds to grapple with this great question, the practical end of this argument will be attained.

How came it to pass, that the living Christianity that superseded a fossil Judaism, has itself been stiffened into an Ecclesiasticism more inflexible than that of chief priests and pharisees; and the Christianity that subverted Paganism, has itself become paganized in its forms, its observances, and its spirit? If we can trace the origin of this now monstrous perversion, we shall better understand its remedy.

I. The first cause of this change was the departure from the idea that the church of Christ, whether in its general or its local forms, is a simple and an equal brotherhood of believers. When

When

Christ appeared, the religious systems of the world were alike hierarchical in their structure and their administration. Whether through some common tradition, or by the urgency of universal guilt, expiatory sacrifices were the prominent feature of all reli. gions. But for sacrifices there must needs be priests; and with the priesthood comes the idea of mediation; until at length a seeming divinity is attached to him who fulfils the office of reconciliation between man and God. The Jewish system had this feature by Divine institution, and by way of type. It had its high priest standing between Jehovah and the people. Pagan Rome had its altars, its priests, and its Pontifex Maximus. This lies in human nature, and in the nature of the case. Christ came, he answered herein the universal want of the human soul. He was the complete and all-sufficient atonement for sin. He now is the one living and prevailing Mediator. Nothing remains for us as relates to ourselves, but to believe in Christ, and accept him as our atonement and priest; and nothing as relates to others, but to proclaim Christ as their Saviour. This is all that one can do under the Gospel: believe in Christ for himself, and persuade others to believe in him also. Christ abolished the law of commandments in ordinances, nailing it to his cross. But that law was not so easily abolished from the human heart. How long it was before the immediate disciples of Christ, with all the advantage of his daily teaching, could comprehend the spirituality of his mission, and see in him the fulfilment and the end of the ceremonial law. How large a portion of the Apostolic writings is given to the proof, that types and ceremonies, altars, priests and sacrifices are superseded by the atonement and mediation of the Lord Jesus Christ.

If Christ made an atonement for the world, no other can be needed; if Christ is Mediator, none other can be recognized or accepted. Hence in the first Christian Society there was one Lord and Master, even Christ, and a company of brethren. The common office and duty of these as disciples, was to make other disciples. No one was lord over the rest; no one had prerogatives higher than the rest; but all were brethren.1 Such a community did not accord with the existing constitution of society, either political or religious. It was contrary to the edu

1 The utter silence of the Evangelists and the other Apostles as to the primacy of Peter, is proof that they did not regard the memorable saying of Christ: "Thou art Peter," etc., as investing him with such primacy.

cation and the habits of all mankind, to all hereditary opinions and usages. It gave no scope to ambition; it testified against castes and hierarchies; and, while it excited the jealousy and the enmity of the great, it failed to satisfy the love of prodigy, pomp and mystery in the ignorant and superstitious. Just here the crafty, the "conservative," and the compromising took advantage of the moral power of the new religion, and of the excitement it had produced, to bring in the old elements of the supernatural and the hierarchical under new forms. Judaizing teachers sought to enforce the observance of the Levitical law; while Pagan casuists, converted into Christian fathers, grafted upon the Gospel their speculative philosophy, together with such usages borrowed from heathenism as they deemed innocent, or as might serve to attract the multitude. In particular, the natural and world-wide notion of a priesthood, a sanctified order in the church, was thus grafted upon Christianity, and that door once opened, there was no limit to the usurpations of spiritual despotism.

By degrees the metropolitan pastor grew to the dignity of a diocesan over the pastors of dependent churches; and when, at length, the name "Christian" ceased to be a reproach and a signal for persecution, and close upon the bloody decrees of Diocletian and the cruel proscription of Galerius, came the Labarum of Constantine, consecrating the imperial banner with the symbol of the cross, and investing Christianity with the protection and the patronage of the State, it was natural that the temples and statues of the old idolatry should be baptized with new names; that Christian bishops, impatient to convert the tolerant emperor, should trace resemblances between his Apollo and their Christ; that the religious festivals that belonged to the national and social life, should put on a new dress; that the Saturnalia and the festival of the winter solstice should be transformed into Christmas;1 and Sun-day and the Sabbath be made coincident; and that the bishop of Rome should make his position in the seat of imperial power an argument for ecclesiastical supremacy. Especially, when Constantine proclaimed Christianity the religion of the empire, and transferred his capital

1 There is no trace of Christmas earlier than the third century. It is an offshoot of Pagan Rome. Vide Neander, Gieseler, Mosheim, and even Cave. Chrysostom argues for it as an appropriate festival, though of recent origin. Other fathers advocate it as a substitute for the Saturnalia.

from the Tiber to the Bosphorus, did the bishop of Rome seek to fortify himself against his eastern rival by the traditionary supremacy of the mistress of the world. When the emperor crept out of the shell of authority that the incrustation of ages had formed about Rome, the Pope quietly crept in.1

The hierarchical constitution of the Papacy rests upon the idea of priestly intercession as its chief corner-stone. Once admit that in the church of Christ there is a consecrated order, having official sanctity and prerogatives; that there is in the Christian brotherhood any other distinction than that which superior talent, and practical wisdom, and high virtue must commanda superiority that is moral and personal, and not official -once create a priesthood, and the Pope is a logical necessity. You must have an apex to your pyramid. Many priests make diversity; these must have superiors, and these, other superiors, till you reach the culminating point of unity and sanctity in the chief priest or Pope.

Herein the Roman Catholic system is a unit; more complete than the Armenian or the Greek. It is the great granite pyramid of Cheops compared with the huge misshapen mounds of brick at Dashour. This system is profoundly adapted to human nature, both logically and artistically. The artistic effect of High Mass in St. Peter's would be improved by abbreviating the homage, and by following the elevation of the Host immediately with the benediction. But even now, in its artistic points, it is the most gorgeous and imposing ceremonial in the world; and, given the premises that underlie it, it has also a fine religious effect. Yet all this pomp of ritual lies in the doctrine of a human priesthood as in a germ. "The idea," says Coleridge," that the church meant the clergy-the hierarchy exclusively constituted the first and fundamental apostasy." And Arnold' declared: "the great cause of hinderance to the triumph of Christianity to be in the corruption not of the religion of Christ, but of the church of Christ." That church he defines to be, not an institution of the clergy, but a living society of all Christians. And he elsewhere says: "The laity is the church minus the clergy, as the people are the State minus the nobility and the

1 This fine point, we believe, is original with Rev. Leonard Bacon, D. D. of New Haven, in his unpublished lectures on Church History and Polity. 2 Known commonly as the false pyramids. 3 Aids to Reflection.

Life, by Stanley.