e forms of relation which men created were no doubt
worldly enough; but the sense that they needed the relation, and must
find it to live out a true man's life was not worldly, but true, noble,
and Divine. The Church from the very hour of the ascension of its Head,
began to act on human society as incomparably the most powerful
influence extant in the world. It literally re-made society from the
very foundations. Far from contenting itself with mastering the will of
individual subjects, and wooing them away from the pursuits and
interests of the world around them, it entered the homes of men, and
cast out the harpy passions which had befouled them; it gave marriage
new sacredness, parents new authority and new responsibility, and
children new grounds of obedience to their sires. It entered the market
and established just weights and balances, honest word, and loyal trust.
Theft could be no virtue, and lying no graceful accomplishment, where it
established its reign. It entered states, and changed tyrants into
kings, serfs into subjects, slaves into freemen, nobles into guardians,
pastors, and captains of industry to the poor. That very Rome which
doomed the King to a malefactor's death, it entered as a conqueror, and
it broke that proud empire to fragments. The time came when Rome could
live no longer in the moral atmosphere which it created; and then it
summoned purer, nobler, hardier races to occupy the homes and to till
the fields which Rome had depopulated and destroyed. It introduced its
laws into every code in Christendom. King Alfred begins his statute
book by reciting the laws of the kingdom of God.[A] In truth it has
penetrated and permeated every vein and fibre of human society, and it
has made it all anew. There is literally nothing with which you in this
nineteenth century can concern yourself,--trade, literature, politics,
science, art, government, social and domestic life, human rights, human
duties, human powers, human fears, aspirations, hopes and joys,--there
is not one element of our complex social and political life which is not
what it is, because eighteen centuries ago the Lord Jesus witnessed this
good confession before Pilate "Thou sayest that which I am, a king."
From the world it has asked nothing, taken nothing, but its reverence
and love: of the world in that sense it has never been. But in the
world, and through the world, the stream of its heavenly virtue and life
has wandered, and the wildern