first-born of the Universal Couple, in that long triumph of the Spiritual Power, to be the realisation of the promise to the Church. A representative of each era and its principle is preserved, however, during the long succession of changes. There are primitive Christians who protest against the political establishment of Christianity, like the Jews against Christianity itself. There are political Christians who respect the union of Church and State, but protest against their fusion, or the supremacy of the spiritual power. Each principle perpetuates itself by preserving its representatives; and even the old Pagans, who dare not show their faces, put on masks and convert the images of the gods into images of the saints, and the Pagan rituals, vestments and festivals into Christian analogues that satisfy the natural passion for such things, and at the same time enable old Paganism to live whilst it seems to be dead. Every work of God is for ever, and there is no new thing under the sun. Forms change and principles ramify; but they all derive their life and energy from one unchangeable source, and all are branches of one tree. We shall distinguish the two following chapters as Acts of the New or Christian Drama; but at the same time they may be regarded as Scenes of the ROMAN or THIRD ACT, to which they necessarily belong. It is a transitional period, representing a great struggle between the three members of the first trilogue of the Drama, in the third act, and ending in a partial victory, partial defeat, and partial combination or fusion of all the three. This partial combination will convert old Political Rome into new Spiritual Rome, and begin a new trilogue when it has passed the Bridge that leads from the olden to the modern times. 212 Act First of the New Drama; BEING ALSO SCENE SECOND OF THE THIRD ACT OF THE ELDER DRAMA. TIME-From the Christian Epoch to the Establishment of LET men talk of chance and seem to believe or comprehend it—let philosophers discourse of necessity and circumstance, and look as wise as they may in the utterance of words impenetrably dark— let historians affirm and critics dispute the facts of history, and the interminable series of their primary and secondary causes-they will never seem or be wiser than simple Faith when it says that Providence chose the best epoch of time, and the most appropriate place, and the most suitable people, and spirit of non-resistance and endurance, for commencing the attack on the old civilisation of the world, and translating it all into another and a higher meaning. The Empire was at its meridian; the crisis was come; yet what philosopher ever could have imagined the character of the coming age ? No one even knew the character of his own age, or the mission of its various elements. Had he known this, he might have foreseen the result; for nothing could be more natural than that which followed; but it was a higher order of natural law than men were familiar with. It is by translations that the progress of society is conducted. One era transforms itself into another, like one language into another, distinct and different in outward appearance, but internally similar or even identical. One structure rises above another, and rests upon it. The plumula comes out of the root and the stock out of the plumula, and the branch out of the stock, and the twig out of the branch, and the fruit out of the twig. The one does not grow independent of its predecessor, but feeds upon it, and makes itself out of it. And thus the new world, whose bud appeared amongst the mountains of Judah, in the reign of Augustus, fed upon the empire of Pagan civilisation which preceded it, and formed itself out of the substance of its predecessor. The one was the egg; the other was the chick. Little did the Messenger of the new era teach that can be called either new or peculiar. He was, strictly speaking, a Jew in religion, with a little more of the free and the logical spirit. He was even exclusive as a Jew, and forbade his disciples to preach to the Gentiles. He was the climax and representative of the Jewish Mission, and contained merely the germ of its successor, as the first man the woman. He added a logical interpretation to the prological voice of the Law and the Prophets. He translated its vulgar, into a higher and a purer, sense; but even this he did so very cautiously, that it was not till after his disappearance from the earth, that his disciples became gradually aware of the amount of liberty involved in the germ of his mission. His doctrine was an acorn adapted for growing; not the full-grown oak-something calculated by its nature to become formidable, but not formidable in its infancy; something also calculated to change and be changed, to assimilate in part, as well as to resist in part, the elements of the three great acts of the Drama, which were now comprehended, but not intelligibly combined, in the trinity of the Empire. It was not for the Jews alone that he came, but for the Greeks and the Romans also; and the germ of his mission must therefore be endowed with power of assimilation adapted for each of the three. Destined to attack and supersede the existing institutions, and nourish itself out of them, it selects, like the Spirit of the Mosaic Economy, the growing and most vital element of Divine Unity, in the first act of the Drama, to begin a new and Divine Drama of its own, in the bosom of the other, with the simple and natural object of eating into and feeding upon all around it. But it gives that Divine Unity the Gentile form of the Divine Humanity, and it even multiplies the unity into three, as if by degrees to rise to the reconciliation of Jewish unity with Gentile multiplicity. Not invested with |