sancta ad vos anima atque istius nescia culpae He goes to the shades with a conscience clear of guilt or of impietas; as the ancient scholiast interprets the word, it is equivalent to incorrupta.26 In this sense it became one of the favourite superlatives to describe in sepulchral inscriptions, pagan or Christian, the purity of departed women and children.27 Lastly, we have the great word sacer, with its compounds sacrificium and sacramentum. The adjective itself has no new or special significance, I think, in the language of the early Christians, and in our Teutonic languages the Roman sense of it, "that which is made over to God," is expressed by the word holy, sacred being retained in a general sense for that which is not "common." But sacrificium, the act of making a thing, animate or inanimate, or yourself, as in devotio, over to the gods, is indeed a great legacy on which I do not need to dwell. Sacramentum, on the other hand, needs a word of explanation. Sacramentum in Roman public law meant (1) a legal formula (legis actio), under which a sum of money was deposited, originally in a temple,28 to be forfeited by the loser in a suit. The deposition in loco sacro gives the word to the process, and helps us to see that it must mean some act which has a religious sanction. So with (2) its other meaning, i.e. the oath of obedience taken by the soldier, who was iuratus in verba, that is, sworn under a formula with a religious sanction attached." It is tempting to suppose that it is through this channel that it found its way into the Christian vocabulary—the soldier of Christ affirming his allegiance in the solemn rites of baptism, marriage, or the Eucharist. It is a curious fact that it seems to be used in this way in the religion of Mithras,30 which was especially powerful among the Roman legions of the Empire, and in which there was a grade of the faithful with the title of milites. Sacramentum was here the word for the initiatory rites 31 of a grade. In the earliest Christian writers of Latin it usually means a mystery; thus Arnobius writes of the Christian religion as revealing the "veritatis absconditae sacramenta"; but in another passage the idea in his mind seems to be that of military service. It is better, he says, for Christians to break their worldly contracts, even of marriage, than to break the fides Christiana, "et salutaris militiae sacramenta deponere ;" "32 and Tertullian more than once attaches the same military meaning to it: "Vocati sumus ad militiam Dei vivi iam tunc cum in verba sacramenti spopondimus." 33 Perhaps we may take it that the word, though of general significance for a religiously binding force produced by certain mysterious rites, had a special attraction for writers of the painful third century A.D., as reflecting into the Christian life from old Roman times something of the spirit of the duty and self-sacrifice of the loyal legionary. In any case we have once more a verbal legacy of priceless value,84 To sum up what I have been saying, there were certain ingredients in the Roman soil, deposits of the Roman religious experience, which were in their several ways. favourable to the growth of a new plant. There were also certain direct legacies from the old Roman religion, of which Christianity could dispose with profit, in the shape of forms of ritual, and, what was even of greater value, words of real significance in the old religion, which were destined to become of permanent and priceless value in the Christian speech of the western nations. There were also other points in the society and organisation of the Roman Empire which were of great importance for the growth of the new creed; but these lie outside my proper subject, and have been dealt with by Professor Gardner in the lecture to which I alluded at the beginning of this lecture, and most instructively by Sir W. M. Ramsay in more than one of his books, and especially in St. Paul, the Traveller and Roman Citizen. And yet, all this taken together, so far from explaining Christianity, does not help us much in getting to understand even the conditions under which it grew into men's minds as a new power in the life of the world. The plant, though grown in soil which had borne other crops, was wholly new in structure and vital principle. I say this deliberately, after spending so many years on the study of the religion of the Romans, and making myself acquainted in some measure with the religions of other peoples. The essential difference, as it appears to me as a student of the history of religion, is this, that whereas the connection between religion and morality has so far been a loose one,-at Rome, indeed, so loose, that many have refused to believe in its existence, the new religion was itself morality,35 but morality consecrated and raised to a higher power than it had ever yet reached. It becomes active instead of passive; mere good nature is replaced by a doctrine of universal love; pietas, the sense of duty in outward things, becomes an enthusiasm embracing all humanity, consecrated by such an appeal to the conscience as there never had been in the world before the appeal to the life and death of the divine Master. This is what is meant, if I am not mistaken, by the great contrast so often and so vividly drawn by St. Paul between the spirit and the flesh, between the children of light and the children of darkness, between the sleep or the death of the world and the waking to life in Christ, between the blameless and the harmless sons of God and the crooked and perverse generation among whom they shine as lights in the world. I confess that I never realised this contrast fully or intelligently until I read through the Pauline Epistles from beginning to end with a special historical object in view. It is useful to be familiar with the life and literature of the two preceding centuries, if only to be able the better to realise, in passing to St. Paul, a Roman citizen, a man of education and experience, the great gulf fixed between the old and the new as he himself saw it. 36 But historical knowledge, knowledge of the Roman society of the day, study of the Roman religious. experience, cannot do more than give us a little help; they cannot reveal the secret. History can explain the progress of morality, but it cannot explain its consecration. With St. Paul the contrast is not merely one of good and bad, but of the spirit and the flesh, of life and death. No mere contemplation of the world around him could have kindled the fervency of spirit with which this contrast is by him conceived and expressed. Absolute devotion to the life and death of the Master, apart even from His work and teaching (of which, indeed, St. Paul says little), this alone can explain it. The love of Christ is the entirely new power that has come into the world; not merely as a new type of morality, but as "a Divine influence transfiguring human nature in a universal love." The passion of St. Paul's appeal lies in the consecration of every detail of it by reference to the life and death of his Master; and the great contrast is for him not as with the Stoics, between the universal law of Nature and those who rebel against it; not as with Lucretius, between the blind victims of religio and the indefatigable student of the rerum natura; not, as in the Aeneid, between the man who bows to the decrees of fate, destiny, God, or whatever we choose to call it, and the wilful rebel, victim of his own passions; not, as in the Roman State and family, between the man who performs religious duties and the man who wilfully neglects them-between pius and impius; but between the universal law of love, focussed and concentrated in the love of Christ, and the sleep, the darkness, the death of a world that will not recognise it. I will conclude these lectures with one practical illustration of this great contrast, which will carry us back for a moment to the ritual of the old Roman ius divinum. That ritual, we saw, consisted mainly of sacrifice and prayer, the two apparently inseparable from each other. I pointed out that though the efficacy of the whole process was believed to depend on the stricte adherence to prescribed forms, whether of actions o words, the prayers, when we first meet with them, have got beyond the region of charm or spell, and are cast in the language of petition; they show clearly a sense of the dependence of man on the Power manifesting itself in the universe. There was here, perhaps, a gen of religious development; but it was arrested in its growth by the formalisation of the whole Roman religious system, and no substitute was to be found for it either in the imported Greek ritual, or in the more enlightening doctrines of exotic Greek philosophy. The prayers used in the ritual of Augustus' great festival, which was almost as much Greek as Roman in character, seem to us as hard and formal as the most ancient Roman prayers that have come down to us. In the most emotional moments of the life of a Roman of enlightenment like Cicero, when we can truly say of him that he was touched by true religious feeling, as well as by the spiritual aspirations of the nobler Greek philosophers, prayers find no place at all. But for St. Paul and the members of the early Christian brotherhood the whole of life was a continuous worship, and the one great feature of that worship was prayer. It has been said by a great Christian writer of recent times that "when the attention of a thinking heathen was directed to the new religion spreading in the Roman Empire, the first thing to strike him as extraordinary would be that a religion of prayer was superseding the religion of ceremonies and invocation of gods; that it encouraged all, even the most uneducated, to pray, or, in other words, to meditate and exercise the mind in selfscrutiny and contemplation of God." 7 And, as the same writer says, prayer thus became a motive power of moral renewal and inward civilisation, to which nothing else could be compared for efficacy. And more than this, it was the chief inward and spiritual means of |