Emperor, when the Messenger of the New and the Holier Dispensation was born. But no time was lost; the Assailant of the Empire had appeared on the stage, so soon as the idea of the Empire was realised. "The lion was coming up from the thicket; the destroyer of the Gentiles was on his way."

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THE NEW OR CHRISTIAN DRAMA;

BEING THE FREE ASPECT OF THE ORIGINAL JEWABSOLUTE MISSION, OR ITS FEMININE COR

ISH

RELATIVE.

PROLOGUE.

WE now return to Judea, to begin de novo. The Trilogue seems to be completed. Rome has apparently conquered, with a mission that gathers all the three by power, but not by faith. Jerusalem and all Palestine are subject to the great Empire. Greece also is prostrate before the Sovereign Lord of the world. Paganism is triumphant; and the people who obtained the promise of a final triumph, and a unitary faith for all nations, are despised as fanatics, and almost themselves disposed to doubt the soundness of their own reason. But that which happens in every drama, happened in this also; what no one expected: neither Jews nor Pagans triumphed. A new movement began, which very speedily bewildered them all. The Jews were as much disappointed as the Romans, and yet the con

quering principle came from their religion. The new Rival Drama begins just where the old began. It is the same Drama, but the liberal portion of it in reference to the Law. It is the typically free in reference to the typically absolute. It is the woman coming out of the man; not subject to the law directly, or in the same sense as he was, but yet subject, by reason of an undefined and mystic relationship with him. Woman is man translated into a softer and more indulgent meaning. She is the type of liberty; the source of multitude, as the bringer forth of children; and in this sense also, the source of division, or the multiplication of parts. There is no collectivity in woman, as in man. She lives in dispersion. She does not organise her numbers in armies and priesthoods, as man does. Her sphere is domestic; and the family, or the social circle, is the largest group with which she is familiar. She is not only the type of multiplication, but of scattered number. The old Jewish Church was a male exclusive Church. It could not multiply, and woman held an inferior position in it. The Christian Church is the Jewish woman who enlarges the tent, and makes room for the multitude of her forthcoming children. She does this by indulgence, by relaxing the liberty of the old law, and translating it into another meaning. Notwithstanding, she still preserves a Jewish characteristic -a certain exclusiveness and strictness--but it is less defined, less absolute; admitting of indulgence,

and mercy, and absolution, and, true to the female instinct, trusting more to the natural promptings of love than to the observance of prescribed rules.

This woman, or New Drama, though coming out of the Jews, is represented by the Greeks; for they are the free and the liberal people. The New Testament was written in Greek. The Gospel was first taught in its liberal and Gentile form, discussed and fashioned into doctrinal shape, in the Greek tongue; and the Jew, by adopting it, became more, whilst the old Greek, by adopting it, became less, liberal. It was a Jewish liberality that was inculcated by it. It was the first act of the Gospel of Liberty, not the last. Liberty grows as law grows; and the first degree in the graduated and progressive series of the New Drama, is merely the seed of the future plant. It is to the end of Liberty what Sinai is to the end of Law. Absolutism, however, grows also, for it is as good as Liberty; and, therefore, whilst the Jews became more liberal by receiving the Gospel, the Greeks and Romans became more absolute. A cross movement takes place between the two opposite principles. The Greeks and Romans go Eastward to Jerusalem for their new faith, but the Christian Jews go Westward for its development. It is the Era of the Cross; and Absolutism and Liberty both grow in the bosom of the same church, and struggle together like Esau and Jacob.

The New Drama combines at last with the Old, and becomes one with it; but it has its own two distinct acts to represent its separate existence for a season. These acts are represented by eras; they do not, like the scenes, run parallel in time. They are definitely and unalterably fixed in the records of history, and they admit of no other division. Thus, for instance, the first act represents primitive Christianity in a subject state, like the woman to her master, the Roman Law. This is her exclusive and Jewish state, in which she lived apart from the world, and regarded it as pollution. The second act represents her union with her master-the political establishment of Christianity-the alliance between a Christian wife and a Roman husband. This began with the Emperor Constantine's conversion, and continued until the final destruction of all the old Pagan gods, and the Justinian Reformation of the Roman Law, when the Old Law was Christianised or baptised, and became the Civil Law of Christendom. Then the Popish Hierarchy began to be established as a definite and an absolute ruling power-the offspring of the union of Roman Law and Jewish Christianity in one. Here,

therefore, the third act begins; but as it begins in the third act of the elder Drama, and at the same time combines with it in the capital of the Roman Empire, the two Dramas here become one, and commence that Great Millennial Reign of the middle ages which appeared to the darkened minds of the

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