in addition to all the rest, publicly denounce the social and political evils under which the nations groan?  If so, your spiritual projects would soon be perfectly understood, and summarily dealt with.  It is in vain to say that, if commissioned by Heaven, and endowed with power of working miracles, you would do so; for you cannot tell under what limitations your commission would be given; it is pretty certain that it would leave you to work a moral and spiritual system by moral and spiritual means, and not allow you to turn the world upside down, nor mendaciously tell it that you came only to “preach peace,” while every syllable you uttered would be an incentive to sedition.

III.  The last point on which you ask a few remarks is in relation to the early spread of Christianity.  Mr. Newman makes easy work of this great problem.  He says, “Before Constantine, Christians were but a small fraction of the empire .....  In fact, it was the Christian soldiers in Constanline’s army who conquered the empire for Christianity.” (Phases, p. 162.)

In the first place, supposing the facts just as stated.—­namely, that it was the Christian soldiers of Constantine who conquered the empire for Christianity,—­who was it that conquered the army for Christianity?  When I find Mahometanism the prevalent religion through the English regiments, I shall shrewdly suspect that the conquest of England for Mahometanism will have been made an easy task, by its having already made equal progress amongst the people generally!

I suppose it will not be denied that the soldiers, by whose aid Constantine achieved this great victory, were themselves professedly converts to Christianity; and Christianity as it had existed in the times of the recent persecutions was not likely to allure men to the profession of arms.  I think, therefore, we may fairly assume, that, if the imperial armies were to any considerable extent—­and it must have been ex hypothesi to a prevailing extent—­composed of Christians, Christianity had made at least equal progress in the ranks of civil life.  The one may be taken as the measure of the other; though we might fairly suppose, both from the principles and habits of the Christians, that they would be found in civil life in a larger ratio.  The camp was not precisely the place for them; the Gospel might find them there, it rarely sent them.  So that the question returns, How came it to pass that the bulk of the armies which “conquered the empire for Christianity” came to be Christians,—­at least in name and profession?

“Ah!” you will say, “in name,—­but they were strange Christians who became soldiers.”  Very true; and it makes my argument the stronger.  Mere professors of a religious system only follow in the wake of its triumphs.  When those who do not care much for a system profess and embrace it, depend upon it, it has largely triumphed.  To suppose, therefore, that Constantine conquered the empire for Christianity, while we admit that the army was already Christian, is very like getting rid of the objection in the way the Irishman proposed to get rid of some superfluous cart-loads of earth.  “Let us dig a hole,” said he, “and put it in.”  It is much the same here.