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beneficent spirit in the heart of Society. When the barbarians besieged and sacked a city, what happened? The Church of Christ awed them and stayed the ruin. The pagans, selfish while rich, fled from danger, famine and pestilence; but the Christians remained, opened to the perishing their sanctuaries and their churches. And those they sheltered were saved alike from the sword and the lust of the barbarians. And so mighty for good was the new Faith, that it made weak woman strong, so pure that the rampant evil of the world could not defile her, so good that as matron, gentle yet deft of hand, or as maiden, soft of voice and swift of foot, she loved to feed the famishing and nurse the diseased. The Rome that had died of paganism Christ was doing His best to save.

But it was the matter of ideal principle that moved Augustine to grandest eloquence and argument. He said, in effect: "Ye were proud, O Romans, of your city. Ye called her eternal, imperial, divine. But her history has rebuked your pride and proved her deities false. There is another city, so glorious in ideal and achievement that yours may not be named beside her. Two cities began to be with man, founded by two loves. The one by the love of self, even to the despising of God; the other by the love of God, even to the despising of self. The first is the city of earth, whose grandest creation was Rome, which glories in self and seeks glory from men; but the second is the heavenly city, whose greatest glory is God, whose witness is conscience. In the one city its princes and people are ruled by the love of ruling; in the other city the princes and subjects serve one another in love. This city is coextensive with the good, comprehends all the saints.

of earth, has created all its virtues and graces, all its truth and righteousness and love. It is the true divine city, for it is built by the only true God; it is the alone eternal, for it shares the eternity of its Builder. The city of Rome ruled the bodies and died through the vices of its people; but this city rules the spirits and lives through the virtues of its citizens, the saints of God." And so he answered the lament of the Romans by setting over against their ideal of the state a state which incorporated an infinitely loftier ideal, stretching not from Romulus till then, but from creation to eternity, and the words which began his splendid apology were but a paraphrase of these: "Glorious things are spoken of thee, O city of God!"

2. Abraham lived in an age very unlike Augustine's. The world was yet young, the mighty empires were still in the distant future, though the foundations of the earliest were being laid. From his home in Ur of the Chaldees he could see the builders at work, the men of Babylon and Nineveh. But he saw that they. were building their cities on idolatry, and he knew that a multitude of gods meant a divided sovereignty, man the master of the gods rather than God the master of man. He knew, too, that to abide in his ancestral home would be to be absorbed into its idolatries; but to his open spirit the Divine voice came calling him to go forth and build a city on a simpler and purer faith, to become the father of a people who should be the people of God. So in his early manhood, with all its boundless promise unrealized, he and his beautiful Sarah turned their backs on the valley which the rivers of Paradise watered, and on the mighty builders who were at work on the foundations of empires vaster

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than they dreamed of; and, hand in hand, they moved westward in search of the land God was to give that they might found a people and a city for Him. They wandered long, saw the wealth of Egypt, fed their flocks on the broad plains of Mamre, looked wistfully on the fertile fields and valleys of Canaan, felt age and feebleness steal on apace, and yet no land or child was theirs. And when at length the promised son came, the gentle Isaac, they loved him with so large a love that the old man feared lest he were dearer to them than even their God. But the sacrifice which at once took and restored the son assured the father, and he waited in eager hope the word that was yet to be fulfilled. But he waited in vain, no land, no field even, became his, and when the beautiful Sarah of his youth, the lovelier, for the more loved, Sarah of his age, died at his side, the old man, bearing the common human sorrow that does not grow lighter for all the centuries of our collective experience and life, had to stand up before the sons of Heth and say: "I am a stranger and a sojourner with you give me a possession of a burying place with you, that I may bury my dead out of my sight." Yet his faith did not fail; he did not think that God had made a promise to the ear only to break it to the hope. He thought rather, "The word of God is larger and diviner than I had believed; the city is to be His, not mine, built in man's time, but for His own eternity. The cities of earth, they perish, but the city of God remaineth." And so from his disappointment a sublimer hope was born, and "he looked for the city which hath the foundations, whose Builder and Maker is God." 2

1 Gen. xxiii. 4.

2 Heb. xi. 10.

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3. John lived in an age unlike Augustine's, still more unlike Abraham's. The men of Egypt and Mesopotamia, Persia and Greece, had successively made their endeavours at empire, had each seemed for a few centuries to succeed, but only the more disastrously to fail. The multitude of deities could not keep their cities, the watchmen waked in vain. But an immenser, mightier state filled their vacant places. Rome from her hills beside the Tiber ruled the world. She seemed at the moment to merit her proud name of "the Eternal." The change Cæsar had worked in the empire was thought to have its type in the change Augustus had worked in the city. He found it brick, he left it marble, all graceful, strong, durable. Who could resist her will? Did not all peoples bow down before her? Feeblest of all the hostile forces, if hostile this could be called, was the society of men who were known as Christians. The empire had but to say, "Let them perish," and its will would be done. And so who cared,-who, indeed, was there to care, but a community so poor as to awaken concern in no one?—when John was banished from the Church and city he loved to a solitude he hated? In Patmos, as the image of his scattered flock rose before him, the sunny Ægean, with all its laughter and music, could not woo him to happy thoughts; but visions at once darker and brighter came both to awe and to cheer his spirit. He saw Rome seated on her seven hills, drunk with the blood of saints, drawing upon herself the judgment of Heaven; but as he turned from the wicked present to the righteous future, from Cæsar to God, a grander image met his sight. He saw, as only the seer can see, what centuries were to be needed to

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make visible," the Holy City," the substitute and supplanter of Rome, "New Jerusalem coming down from God out of heaven, made ready as a bride adorned for her husband."1

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In these so dissimilar and distant men a similar faith stands expressed. There is a city of God invisible, spiritual, which knows no place or time, which embodies God's ideal of society, the ordered and obedient life of man.

1. As so understood and interpreted, they supply the point of view from which the city is to be here regarded. It does not mean to us either a material heaven or a visible church. There are men who feel as if heaven could have no being unless placed in a city which stands square and strong to every wind that blows, whose walls are of precious stones, whose streets are of fine gold, paced perpetually by pilgrims who sing and carry palms, while in the midst, visible to all, is the throne of God and the Lamb. And there are men who think that the city of God must be a kind of political corporation, an articulated and organized system, which can boast a continuous life, an immense body of tradition, and can speak with the authority which belongs to its inherited experience, its collective wisdom, and its supernatural gifts and powers. But these ideas are alike sensuous, stand on the same level as regards spiritual culture and significance. A heaven which were but a city of marble palaces and streets resonant with song, would grow so wearisome to spirits that loved contemplation, or to

1 Rev. xxi. 2.