bound with grave-clothes, smelling to heaven with corruption, and powerless to help themselves as the dry bones in Ezekiel's valley of vision. Antioch itself was the epitome of such a world.

2. A CONTRAST.

Nazareth and But note the

The Augustan age had glorified Rome with marbles for its bricks, and with the golden lyres of poets for its legions of iron, yet left it more debased than ever before. Horace had just died, and Herod was rivalling Augustus in his Roman extravagance by making the very pavement of Antioch of solid marble, when the Galilean maiden sang her Magnificat in obscure and despised Nazareth, and gave the first hymn of Redemption to those who looked for the Messiah. Antioch behold the contrast. meek virgin in her cot, and all the powers of the world in their forts and palaces: hear her sweet song, the first strain of Christian poesy, the germ of liturgies and prayers for evangelized tribes and peoples of the earth, and contrast it with the frantic rites of the bacchanal, the sensual orgies, the licentious dances, and the reeking wickedness of that city on the Orontes, which was so absolute a type of all that stretched away from its port to Greece and Italy, to the barbarians of Germany and Gaul, and to the ancient seats of our own race in Jutland and Britain. Truly hath God chosen "the weak things of the world to confound the mighty," and, as we shall soon observe, "things which are despised hath God chosen, yea and

things which are not, to bring to naught things that are."

3. AN INQUIRY.

But why was Antioch rather than Jerusalem made the capital of the new empire of Messiah? Among other reasons this will afford an answer: the Prince of Peace came not to the Jews only. "In Him shall the Gentiles trust," was the promise He has so richly fulfilled. Now Antioch was "a mart of nations"; it was, in type, Gentilism itself. Jerusalem could not be made the metropolis of Catholicity; it was the stronghold of Judaism. The rod of the new power was to "go forth from Jerusalem." To have kept it there would have been to fortify and perpetuate those intense prejudices of the Circumcision, which in the case of St. Paul himself were the most formidable of all obstacles to his work. "New bottles for new wine." He who had broken down the Jewish wall of separation, and made the new temple walls to unite Jew and Gentile in Himself as the corner-stone, brought both walls together in Antioch. It was "the foolishness of God, wiser than men," to economize the moral rubbish of the Seleucid capital, as he took a hill of refuse from the Jebusites when he created Zion the stronghold of the typical Church.

4. THE PORTRAITURE OF ANTIOCH.

The unhappy genius of Renan has so ably depicted this ancient Paris, borrowing his colours

from the modern one which inflames his imagination and has debased his pen, that it would be folly for me not to adopt the vivid picture with which he has anticipated the tasks of all who would hereafter undertake to describe it. I shall therefore freely translate his brilliant rhetoric, amplifying or abridging it as may best suit my purpose, but making it my own by the very injury I must inflict on such splendid work by my attempt to infuse its spirit into English words.

According to Renan,1 the metropolis of the Orient was a city of more than five hundred thousand souls. Before its recent extension Paris itself was hardly larger. Its site was one of the most picturesque of the whole earth, made of the space between the Orontes and the slopes of Silpius. Unrivalled were the beauty and the abundance of its waters. Nature had fortified it as by a masterpiece of military art, surrounded as it was by lofty rocks, which crowned it with a radiating circlet of peaks. Thence were afforded surprising perspectives: one beheld within the walls hills not less than seven hundred feet high, great rocks bristling with spires, precipices, inaccessible caves, torrents and cascades rushing into deep ravines, where delicious gardens nestled. Here were dense thickets of myrtles, of flowering box, of laurels and evergreens, of which the verdure was most tender, and rocks embroidered with pinks, hyacinths, and cyclamens, which gave their savage summits the effect of hanging gardens. Such was the Antioch of Libanius, of Julian, of Chrysostom.

1 See Note O.

Here the imperial legate of Syria kept his court. The Seleucid kings raised it from nothing, and like the growth of a single night, to a lofty pitch of splendour, but the Roman occupation had glorified it even more. The Seleucids had indeed set the example of decorating cities with theatrical effect, multiplying baths, basilicas, aqueducts, and temples. The streets, more symmetrical and regular than elsewhere, were bordered with colonnades, and at their intersections adorned with statues. Antiochus Epiphanes had carried through the city, stretching three miles from end to end, a superb Corso, ornamented by columns, in four rows, which made covered galleries on both sides, with the broad avenue between. But, besides its huge constructions of public utility, Antioch was distinguished above other Syrian cities by its possession of masterpieces of Greek art, — admirable statues, and delicate specimens of classic taste, of which at this epoch the refined perfections could no longer be imitated. Into this region of the Orontes, the Macedonians, transplanted by Seleucus Nicator from Antigonia, had brought the worship and the territorial names of their own land, lasting memorials of their attachment to Pæonia and Pieria, and to "the fair humanities" adored at Castaly and in the Vale of Tempe. Thus the Greek myths gained a new creation and new seats of worship in Syria. Phoebus and the Muses were part of the population of the city, in mute marble, it is true, but seeming to live and breathe, as in fact they inspired the surrounding masses of flesh and blood. As a retreat from the bustling market,

Daphne opened to its inhabitants an enchanting grove where the most charming fictions of the Greek poets were brought to the minds of the Orientals. Here the wretched Julian was destined long afterwards to make a last desperate effort to heal the death-wound of idolatry. The spot was a practical plagiarism; counterfeiting a plan of the nomadic tribes, who originally brought names to Berecyntia, Ida, and Olympus. Altogether, the fables of outworn heathenism made up for the place a religion hardly more serious than the Metamorphoses of Ovid. Girdled by the river, Mount Casius lifted to the skies altars and idols, the graver relics of indigenous superstition. This spot was doomed to retain its hold on local enthusiasm when surrounding idols should give way before the Light, and to smoke with the last faint whiffs of incense that symbolized expiring Paganism. In short, the Syrian frivolity, Babylonian quackery, and all the impostures of Asia, muddled and confused at this meeting-point of two worlds, had made of Antioch a sewer of infamies. It was the metropolis of Lies.

5. THE POPULACE.

The Syrian tongue was yet to be heard among its aborigines, infesting its faubourgs and forming the suburban population of a vast vicinity. By a law of Seleucus, all resident aliens were made citizens, and by intermarriages with Greeks his capital at the close of three centuries and a half was the place of all the world in which the human race seemed most effectually hybridized. The conse