suffered, and rejoicing that they were counted worthy to suffer for His sake.  And that crown of glory which they did believe to await them in a life beyond the grave, was no enjoyment of what they had surrendered in life, was not enjoyment at all in any sense which human thought or language can attach to the words; as little like it as the crown of love is like it, which the true lover looks for when at last he obtains his mistress.  It was to be with Christ—­to lose themselves in Him.

How all this nobleness ebbed away, and Christianity became what we know it, we are partially beginning to see.  The living spirit organized for itself a body of perishable flesh:  not only the real gains of real experience, but mere conjectural hypotheses current at the day for the solution of unexplained phenomena, became formulae and articles of faith; again, as before, the living and the dead were bound together, and the seeds of decay were already planted on the birth of a constructed polity.  But there was another cause allied to this, and yet different from it, which, though a law of human nature itself, seems now-a-days altogether forgotten.  In the rapid and steady advance of our knowledge of material things, we are apt to believe that all our knowledge follows the same law, that it is merely generalized experience, that experience accumulates daily, and, therefore, that “progress of the species,” in all senses, is an obvious and necessary fact.  There is something which is true in this view mixed with a great deal which is false.  Material knowledge, the physical and mechanical sciences, make their way from step to step, from experiment to experiment, and each advance is secured and made good, and cannot again be lost; one generation takes up the general sum of experience where the last laid it down, adds to it what it has the opportunity of adding, and leaves it with interest to the next.  The successive positions, as they are gained, require nothing for the apprehension of them but an understanding ordinarily cultivated.  Prejudices have to be encountered, but prejudices of opinion merely, not prejudices of conscience or prejudices of self-love, like those which beset our progress in the science of morality, Here we enter upon conditions wholly different, conditions in which age differs from age, man differs from man, and even from himself, at different moments.  We all have experienced times when, as we say, we should not know ourselves; some, when we fall below our average level; some, when we are lifted above it, and put on, as it were, a higher nature.  At such intervals as these last, (unfortunately, with most of us, of rare occurrence,) many things become clear to us, which before were hard sayings; propositions become alive which, usually, are but dry words.  Our hearts seem purer, our motives loftier; our purposes, what we are proud to acknowledge to ourselves.  And, as man is unequal to himself, so is man to his neighbour, and period to period.  The entire method