e scene which they had witnessed had in it something more awful
than they could have conceived, and as they returned to Jerusalem they
wailed and beat upon their breasts. Well might they do so! This was the
last drop in a full cup of wickedness: this was the beginning of the end
of their city and name and race.

And in truth that scene was more awful than they, or even we, can know.
The secular historian, be he ever so sceptical, cannot fail to see in it
the central point of the world's history. Whether he be a believer in
Christ or not, he cannot refuse to admit that this new religion grew
from the smallest of all seeds to be a mighty tree, so that the birds of
the air took refuge in its branches; that it was the little stone cut
without hands which dashed into pieces the colossal image of heathen
greatness, and grew till it became a great mountain and filled the
earth. Alike to the infidel and to the believer the Crucifixion is the
boundary instant between ancient and modern days. Morally and
physically, no less than spiritually, the faith of Christ was the
_palingenesia_ of the world. It came like the dawn of a new spring to
nations "effete with the drunkenness of crime." The struggle was long
and hard, but from the hour when Christ died began the death-knell to
every satanic tyranny and every tolerated abomination. From that hour
holiness became the universal ideal of all who name the name of Christ
as their Lord, and the attainment of that ideal the common heritage of
souls in which his spirit dwells.

The effects, then, of the work of Christ are even to the unbeliever
indisputable and historical. It expelled cruelty; it curbed passion; it
branded suicide; it punished and repressed an execrable infanticide; it
drove the shameless impurities of heathendom into a congenial darkness.
There was hardly a class whose wrongs it did not remedy. It rescued the
gladiator; it freed the slave; it protected the captive; it nursed the
sick; it sheltered the orphan; it elevated the woman; it shrouded as
with a halo of sacred innocence the tender years of the child. In every
region of life its ameliorating influence was felt. It changed pity from
a vice into a virtue. It elevated poverty from a curse into a beatitude.
It ennobled labor from a vulgarity into a dignity and a duty. It
sanctified marriage from little more than a burdensome convention into
little less than a blessed sacrament. It revealed for the first time the
angeli