"There is an ambition," began Clement, now rising, "whose aim is not yourself-that is, the Christian ambition. Forget yourself, give glory to God, save humanity, live out of yourself, live to God, live, yet not you, but Christ in you; have the ambition of the Christian. Let not your left hand know what your right hand doeth. Be disinterested. This is better and higher than worldly or even philosophic ambition.

"Prostrate in the dust before the face of God, the Christian is resplendent with a glory that can never shine around another brow. Slandered, abused, disfigured with wounds, while hanging on the cross, Sebastian, the Christian, is attired in a majesty that never clothed an earthly potentate. He is of a royal priesthood, a chosen generation, a peculiar people. This is an ambition worthy of a god. Inaccessible to injuries, undaunted by perils, his life and death are an offering to God, an atonement for man. He walks under the banners of the Christ, his name is written in heaven. "Christianity supplies the element wanting in the heathen sage.* Sacrifice is the life of the Christian; it is his ambition. Christ died for the world; the Christian dies to self, and finds a life in death. The sage aspired to be great and good. The Christian aspires to make men great and to do good; sacrifice is the medium, salvation the end of the work.

"In the universe, from the greatest to the least, unity runs through all. God is the fountain of love; all His qualities blend and converge into that centre. Heroes, saints, and the great have ever had a unity in their character. With one it is poverty, with another charity, and, to come to the mightiest example on earth, Christ had unity in His earthly life, continued to this hour in the Everlasting Presence. One great overwhelming resolution and volition ran through His character and earthly biography. It was not merely humility, mercy, nor even charity, faith, or works; nor was it merely heroism, or purity, or prayer; these were God-like steps to the kingly throne -it was disinterestedness, or more properly sacrifice.

"This was the rock of ages on which He stood, and on which He built His Church; and all who build their life and salvation on that rock shall stand for ever.

"The great secret of happiness in the present and beatitude in the future is sacrifice. He that loseth his life shall find it.

* See in the charming Bucolics of Virgil, and especially in ode "Beatus ille" of Horace, the expression of the highest pagan ideal of an honest, peaceful, easy life.

Supernatural, superhuman, heroic acts of generosity and magnanimity are the work, the life to which Christ summons us. How few dare to follow Him! He stands aloft in the skies, shouldering the Cross,* and beckons us on; the road is arduous, no man can follow Him who does not take up his cross and deny himself. Oh, but what a divine life is this! Who can hesitate? Do not your hearts burn within you when you see that Form and path of life? Advance, mortal! onward, Christian! march after your Christ, and you outgrow nature and humanity, and reach the divine !"

As these words died upon his lips, the shadowy procession with the crowns of light re-formed, and moving away, left the traveller to grope back by the uncertain flare of his torch.

CHAPTER LIX.

A NIGHT IN THE FORUM.

ONE evening when it was late, and stars shone bright on ancient Rome, our traveller from a distant land bent his steps past the Capitol and the site of the Tarpeian Rock, to the Forum, and there, seated among the ruined pillars of the Temple of Concord, where the senate used to assemble, he meditated on the transitory nature of empires and of all human affairs.

The hours wore on; the night was bright, the spirit of solitude occupied the Forum, our traveller was quite alone. At length the ground of the ancient Forum seemed to stir, the dust of ages was in movement, a crowd of toga'd senators drew nigh, the consuls came by on their triumphal car, preceded by lictors carrying their fasces, behind them came their captives, suppliant and chained, hosts of bronzed legionary warriors followed in the rear, while the crowd of Quirites looked down and filled the night air with their clamour.

At length a majestic form stood forth in imperial purple, a noble and stately form. The traveller heard him named Trajan, while in his company stood a venerable pontiff, who bore a strong likeness to the great Athanasius. Concealed in a recess underneath the deep shadow of a pillar, the traveller listened to catch

* St. Ignatius.

any words of these august personages as they entered the ruined precincts of the Forum.

The first to break silence was Trajan, who, standing erect in the bright starlight, and looking at the pontiff, thus addressed him :

"Friend, the destiny of Rome is universal empire, for by bringing all the known world under the sway of her eagles, Roman law, civilization, and an universal Latin tongue, become the inheritance of the human race. Already are the frontiers of the empire advanced to the remotest banks of the Danube, to the interminable plains of the Sarmatians, they reach the eternal fogs and twilight of the tin islands, and Britain at the end of the world, they extend beyond the pillars of Hercules in the west, to the patriarchal Euphrates in the east, to the fabulous cataracts of the Nile in the south. The majesty of Roman law subdues the known earth, our causeways stretch out their long arms to immense spaces, the camps of our veteran legions are firmly planted along the borders of the German Rhine, on the green hills of Cambria, in the fastnesses of Caledonia, and everywhere we teach the natives to respect the arts and arms of Rome. Marble thermæ, monumental amphitheatres, admirable aqueducts attend our colonies and grow up on all hands, the known world is renovated under Roman rule, Latin is the universal language, unity is restored, and it is evident that Rome is destined by the gods to be the arbiter of history, to restore all nations to unity, to put an end to the divisions of tongues, and races, and creeds, and to bend the wills and necks of men under the edicts of the senate and the Roman people. Thus will the world be blessed, and this Temple of Concord become the symbol of the universal unity."

"There is a truth in what thou sayest, mighty emperor," replied Athanasius, "though thou dost not see it. Rome is a providential agent in the work of unity and peace, and prepares, uncon sciously, the advent of better things. But it is not her laws or her worship that are to win the victory and do the work, it is that 'infamous' sect of Christians thou didst cruelly persecute, oft in ignorance, that is to restore all things in the end to unity." The great patriarch of Alexandria paused, and then continued :"The earth is the Lord's and the fulness thereof' (1 Cor. x. 26). 'For it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of His pleasure' (Phil. ii. 13). "There is one God and Father of all, who is above all, and through all, and in you all' (Eph. iv. 6). 'Whether we live, therefore, or die, we are the Lord's'

Rom. xiv. 8). For in Him we live and move and have our being.'

"This is Unity. All things in heaven and all on earth, everything whatever is Christ's, and Christ is God's. God is in all things, lives in all things, brings about all things, rules all things. In this way 'all things are one in God.' Unity is found in all. Our life, our being, our body, our spirit, our thoughts, our actions are all full of God. God is the great universal One, the Arbiter as well as the Absolute of all things. The only thing that is not God in essence or divine in procession, is the will of man, and our duty is to make that one with God, the conformity of the saint, the identity of the philosopher, the sum and substance of holiness, and the consummation of charity.* This conformity is wrought by the spirit of Christ, by Him who came that we might all be one in God.† The end of all things will be when God will be all in all, when the ages militant will pass jubilant into the eternal sabbath, and the great Agone of history will issue in the perfect peace.

"From this survey it follows that unity is the order of creation and the end of revelation, though the fruition of the fulness escapes the temporal and local phases of a humanity ever struggling after the great ideal, and is reserved for the day when there shall be no more time. With this life-thought man must be faithful and fearless about accidents and events. Evil absolute and evil permanent are the diseased fancies of our insanity, the groaning of the creature is soon merged in the hosannahs of the great destiny, the darkest pages of history are soon lost in the cascades of light descending on the innocence of a new-born

* Care must be taken to distinguish the Christian conformity and unity of the will with God from the evwoic of the Alexandrian school, which, like the mysticism of the Buddhist, consists in the suppression and destruction of humanity. Yet, even in those mystic aberrations, we trace the evidence and influence of the central truth, for the Alexandrian and Buddhist Trinity, as well as the anλwoig and ExoTaois of the former, are reflections and imitations of evangelic intuitions. "Hist. Gén. de la Philosophie," par V. Cousin, 171. "L'Eglise et l'Empire Romain au 4e Siècle," par M. Albert de Broglie, ch. iii., vol. i., "L'Eglise d'Orient et l'Arianisme."

† John xvii. Dieu, en tant qu'unité, est la perfection, et l'imperfection consiste a s'ecarter de l'unité, le perfectionnement consiste donc a aller sans cesse de l'imperfection au type de la perfection, c'est à dire de la diversité à l'unité. Le bien est l'unité, le mal est la diversité; le retour au bien c'est le retour à l'unité, et par consequent la loi, la règle de toute morale, c'est la resemblance de l'homme à Dieu, oμoλoya TOоS TO Oεlov, et la vertu est une harmonie."- "Histoire Générale de la Philosophie," par V. Cousin, p. 110 ("Psychologie Pythagoricienne").

Cosmos. Evil cannot rest upon the head of man lapped on the everlasting knee. All is the Lord's, and what seemeth evil is like death the harbinger of life. Trust in the Lord and be at peace. The Lord gives and the Lord takes away, the hairs of your head are all numbered. Oh! race of mourners, dry your tears, the dirge of history will issue in the great Te Deum, our secular miserere will swell into the hallelujah of the spheres, the hills will clap their hands and the forest rejoice as a new band of brothers, the humanity of hope, garlanded with peace and heralded by joy, shall occupy this dungeon and this place of skulls, once more the golden glades of Paradise. Leave, then, sinner, mourner in this dreary twilight, leave fortune, events, and accidents to God. Look within, unite your will to His by the spirit of Christ, and you are safe. Be it your royal ambition and your proudest work to be one with God, to let His spirit live in you, and take the place of your own. Thus you will put on a divine nature, and the outcast and the down-trodden are irradiated with that comfort transcending all that earth can yield, for they see with hollow cheek and streaming eye that whatever their rank or place, if one with God, they may have a divine nature. Oh! the dignity of this divinest political and social code. Slavery, serfdom, and selfishness, in all their forms, evaporate before this breath of angels, while our revolutionary spasms and socialistic strains appear in its focus as the baby passions or invalid frettings of an infant or a doating race not yet awake or alive to the majesty of the crown and sceptre offered freely to every son of humility and spouse of poverty! According to Christ there is no respect of persons, and according to His apostle, 'to the Christian all things are pure.' For to the mind raised to new potencies of time and space, humanity and nature are God's work, and reversing the madness of our godless pigmies, to the Christian thinker man is so far from owing the origin of his species to the accidents of zoophytes and jelly-fish, that the very water-drop teems with wonders of providential design,* and the powers and chemistry of the phenomenal variations without us are spiritualised into a new and higher unity.

'Science, bereft of faith, is ever silliness; it soars or sinks with it, and towers sublime or lapses ridiculous, according to the temperature of reverence. Viewed fundamentally in the Christian

"Origin of Species;" C. Darwin. "Vestiges of Creation." Compared with Quatrefages and Flourens.