oid of virtue;
there is no point where conviction compels man to become a sceptic, and
scepticism pulls him down into barbarism. As the atmosphere which
surrounds our planet supplies the vital element alike to the full-grown
man and to the infant, so Christianity supplies the breath of life to
society in all its stages,--in its full-grown manhood, as well as in its
immature infancy. There is more meaning than the world has yet
understood in the statement that the Gospel has brought "life and
immortality to light." Its Divine Founder introduced upon the stage that
system which is the _life_ of nations. The world does not furnish an
instance of a nation that has continued to be Christian, that has
perished. We believe the thing to be impossible. While great Rome has
gone down, and Venice sits in widowed glory on the Adriatic, the poor
Waldenses are still a people. The world tried but could not extinguish
them. Christianity is synonymous with life: it gives immortality to
nations here, and to the individual hereafter. Hence Daniel, when
unfolding the state of the world in the last age, gives us to understand
that, when once thoroughly Christianized, society will no longer be
overwhelmed by those periodic lapses into barbarism which in every
former age has set limits to the progress of States. "And in the days of
those kings shall the God of heaven set up a kingdom which shall never
be destroyed." Unlike every preceding era, immortality will then be the
chief characteristic of nations.

But must it not strike every one, in connection with this subject, that
in proportion as Romanism developes itself, the nations under its sway
sink the deeper into barbarism? This fact Romanist writers now see and
bewail. What stronger condemnation of their system could they pronounce?
For surely if religion be of God, it must, like all else that comes
from Him, be beneficent in its influence. He who ordained the sun to
irradiate the earth with his light, and fructify it with his warmth,
would not have given a religion that fetters the understanding and
barbarises the species. And yet, if Romanism be divine, He has done so;
for the champions of that Church, compelled by the irresistible logic of
facts, now tacitly acknowledge that a decaying civilization is following
in the wake of Roman Catholicism in every part of the world. Listen, for
instance, to the following confession of M. Michel Chevalier, in the
_Journal des Debats_:--

"I canno