eginning 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.

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;[991] 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 th