in heaven, and things on earth, and things under the earth; and that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father' (Phil. ii. 9-11).

III.— The Heathenism of Rome diabolically opposed Christianity in its Congregational or Ecclesiastical Manifestation.

The second form in which Christianity manifested and established itself in the world was the congregational or ecclesiastical. It naturally developed from the personal stage and retained it within itself. The individual Christians, attracted and moulded as they all are by Christ, are related to each other like the radii of a common centre. They all trace their new life to Him as its source, and recognise in Him the type and regulating law of its development and manifestation. The same bond of union which connects them with their spiritual Head also joins them to one another, as living members of one spiritual body. 'Whosoever loveth him that begat, loveth him also that is begotten of him' (I John v. 1). Christianity is essentially a uniting, communion-forming principle: its natural outcome are religious communities, Churches.

During the lifetime of Christ, and for a number of years after His death, His disciples were only united by the inward tie of faith and love, but outwardly continued members of the Jewish community. In Antioch they were first recognised as a distinct denomination, that of 'Christians' (Acts xi. 26). At the close of the first century from the birth of Christ, whole portions of the Roman empire were dotted with congregations of Christians; and St. John, in his old age, was directed to write letters to the seven most celebrated and representative Churches of Asia Minor (Rev. i. 11).

It is notorious how these youthful and rapidly multiplying Christian communities were persecuted for nearly 300 years; and how long the Roman empire, so tolerant in matters of religion generally, treated Christianity as a , 'religio illicita,' and sought to prevent its propagation and profession by all the rigour of its laws and the whole weight of its secular force. Lactantius, a Christian historian of that time, thus refers to

the sad drama: 'Had I the power of language a hundredfold, still I could not relate all the crimes that were committed, nor recount all the torments which the ingenuity of rulers devised against unnumbered multitudes of innocent Christians.' Eusebius, another historian of the same period, in recording the effects of the persecution by the Emperor Diocletian in the single Province of Egypt, where churches had greatly multiplied, declares that 70,000 Christians had to suffer imprisonment, slavery, and banishment, that 140,000 died the death of martyrs, and that sometimes so many were beheaded in a single day, that the executioners became weary of their butcheries, and their instruments were blunted. By such inhuman means Heathenism, the State-religion of Rome, strove to rid itself of what it felt to be a formidable rival, full of youthful ardour and energy.

No crimes could be carried home to the Christians in their religious assemblies, as their heathen adversaries had so often attempted to do; but the real cause of all this hatred and enmity is already referred to in Pliny's celebrated letter to the Emperor Trajan, where he informed his Imperial master that all over the Province of Bithynia, of which he was the Procurator, the public temples and altars were deserted, and there remained but few who brought offerings to the idols and their priests. Now if St. Paul speaks truly 'that the things which the Gentiles sacrifice, they sacrifice to demons and not to God' (1 Cor. x. 20), then the interests of Idolatry and the interests of the spiritual powers of Darkness, which formed the background of Idolatry, were virtually identical. The cause threatened and the cause to be defended were a common cause. Demoniacal inspirations and impulses can therefore hardly have been wanting in the cruel persecutions against the rising Christian Church, by which the Idolaters of the Roman empire so pertinaciously tried to uphold their ancestral religion. The ancient Fathers, Justin Martyr, Tertullian, and others, were quite consistent in tracing the origin of these atrocious persecutions back to that source.

But, as every one can easily understand, it does not follow from this, that the powers of Darkness must have equally regarded it as their interest, some centuries later, to