and you know too, how, before the gospel was preached in
Alexandria, crowds of all classes, excepting the Jews, thronged the
Serapeum.

"A dim perception of the sublime teaching of the Lord by whom God has
redeemed the world had dawned, even before His appearance on earth, on
the spirit of the best of the heathen, and in the hearts of those wise
men who--though not born into the state of grace--sought and strove after
the truth, after inward purity, and an apprehension of the Almighty. The
Lord chose them out to prepare the hearts of mankind for the good
tidings, and make them fit to receive the gospel when the Star should
rise over Bethlehem.

"Many of these sages had infused precious doctrine into the worship of
Serapis before the hour of true redemption had come. They enjoined the
servants of Serapis to be more zealous in the care of the soul than in
that of the body, for they had detected the imperishable nature of the
spiritual and divine part of man; they saw that we are brought into
existence by sin and love, and we must therefore die to our sinful love
and rise again through the might of love eternal. These Hellenes, like
the Egyptian sages of the times of the Pharaohs, divined and declared
that the soul was held responsible after death for all it had done of
good or evil in its mortal body. They distinguished virtue and sin by the
eternal law, which was written in the hearts even of the heathen, to the
end that they, by nature, might do the works of the law; nay, there were
some of their loftiest spirits who, though they knew not the Lord, it is
true, required the repentance in the sinner, in the name of Serapis, and
pronounced that it was good to give up the delusive joys and vain
pleasures of the flesh and to break away from the evil--whether of body
or of soul--which we are led into by the senses. They called upon their
disciples to hold meetings for meditation whereby they might discern
truth and the divinity; and the vast precincts of the Serapeum contained
cells and alcoves for penitents and devotees, in which many a soul
touched by grace, dead to the world and absorbed in the contemplation of
such things as they esteemed high and heavenly, has ripened to old age
and death.

"But, my beloved, the Light in which we rejoice, through no merits or
deserts of our own, had not yet been shed on the lost children of those
days of darkness; and all those noble, and indeed most admirable efforts
were polluted b