it must be remembered that the erring Adam was expelled from paradise, where he had been dwelling in perfect innocence, and his paradise bears the same relation to the common earth he afterterwards inhabited sorrowfully that Plato's heaven bore to man's mortal estate. It is doubtful whether Plato's philosophism would ever have been incorporated with Christianity, if his disciple Philo had not accepted it as a theory of man's good and evil, and applied it to the mythical narrative in the Book of Genesis, itself probably a fragment of the old Persian traditions. Philo, evidently possessed by Plato's thought-for he imputes the fall of Adam, not to any moral guilt, but solely to his weakness and imperfection-describes his condition before and after that catastrophe in almost the very words of Christian theologians. He speaks of the earth as a strange country, of mortal life as a pilgrimage through straits and necessities, of death as a return home. The doctrine of the fall is fundamental in Christian theology; without it the "scheme of redemption" would not have been at all what it is. But this doctrine owes its existence to Plato, and to a disciple of Plato who lived at Alexandria, who had never heard of Christ, who was a Jew, but tenfold more a philosopher, who endeavored to sublimate Judaism, and who earned his fame by mediating between the Eastern and Western thought.

The Christian doctrine of the Incarnation is as old as human thought and feeling, as human wonder and human aspiration. In all primeval religions we meet with precisely the same belief. The religion of India gives a prominent place to the ten avatars, descents or incorporations of Vishnu, which this guardian god of the world made for the purpose of delivering mankind from physical and moral destruction; from floods, monsters, giants and evil demons, the authors of wickedness and impiety. In the Persian religion we find the legend of Mithras, the creative deity and mediator, standing between the upper and the lower world, and bringing light and mercy to those dwelling in the darkness of the perishable earth. The Osiris of the Egyptian religion corresponds to the Mithras of the Persian: he is a god, beneficent and suffering, a redeemer, dying in his endeavor to redeem. The belief in incarnation penetrating the whole mind of the Orientals, and affording the noblest field for the play of the imagination, gave rise to all those beautiful myths and poems which tell us nearly all we know of the religion of the East.

In the West we find an analogous doctrine in the belief in heroes and hero worship which characterized the religious systems of Greece. The story of Perseus, the god-man, born of Jupiter and Danaë; of Hercules, likewise the offspring of the highest god and a mortal mother, and uniting in himself the human attributes and the divine, gifted with supernatural power, and representing the ideal of virtue in that primeval time, laboring for the welfare and salvation of men, destroying monsters in human and in beastly shape, the enemy of evil, the foe of tyrants, the conqueror of death itself, descending at last into the underworld, and returning thence unharmed, thus breaking the might of the grave; the variously told story of Dionysius derives its significance from the belief in incarnations. All these myths were of Oriental origin, and changed their character somewhat when adopted by the Grecian. mind. There is a marked difference between the incarnation theory of the East and that of the West, a difference sufficiently well. expressed by saying that in the East the gods became men, in the West the men became gods; in the East the divine element predominated over the human, in the West the human predominated over the divine. The glories of the Oriental religion did not allow the mingling of the spiritual with the fleshly; the immortal, therefore, only appeared in a human shape. They were not men, but they seemed to be men. They had no animal qualities, no earthly body, no passions, no infirmities. Djenschid was one of the most glorious of the lords of light who ever came to the globe; but there was no blending of the celestial and the terrestrial in his person. Mithras was pure god with only the semblance of humanity. Vishnu is said to have been born of a virgin, and may be supposed therefore to have assumed in part the attributes of man; but in his case the union of the two elements is indistinct, abnormal and grotesque, and the immortal part remains almost as much by itself as if the mortal was not attached. The Greek heroes, on the other hand, were solid men, made of flesh and blood. Their human part was no mere shadow of their divinity, did not vanish and become as nought in the overpowering splendor of the Godhead, but asserted itself as of kin with the Godhead. They rose to be gods not by meditation and longing, but by action, awakening and developing the deity that dwelt and wrought within them. They exhibited a self-sacrificing love for country and their kind, a patient and united courage in the performance of

duty, a holy obedience to the commands of the Eternal. They illustrated God. They were inspired, being so completely human; their mediation was the more perfect, for they could sympathize with men, bear their burdens, understand their temptations, exemplify righteousness to them so that they could imitate it, be to them, in one word, deities on earth.

At first view, the Christian doctrine of Incarnation seems to differ from both of these equally. The union of the two natures in Christ is not represented or paralleled either in Vishnu or in Hercules. The difference, however, is formal, not material, and an examination leads to the conviction that the Christian doctrine grew out of neither of these separately, but out of them both combined. Here, again, Christian theology has mediated between the Eastern and the Western thought. It is undeniable that the orthodox doctrine respecting the person of Jesus was the result of controversy between the Oriental and the Occidental systems; between those who laid stress upon the divinity and those who emphasized the humanity of Christ. One party contended that Jesus had a mortal body, in all respects like that of other men. Another party maintained that his body was not made of mortal stuff; that it was a "spiritual" body, insensible to pain, requiring no nourishment. This was the Persian theory, and was accepted by Clement of Alexandria, and Origen, authorities in the church. The doctors disputed about the soul of Jesus, as they did about his body. The Alexandrian Fathers were Orientals, contending that the Logos took the place of the rational and spiritual nature in Christ. Tertullian was an Occidental, holding that the soul of Christ was like that of other men. The semi-Arians again accepted the Persian view. All agreed that Christ was sinless. In the controversies respecting the mode in which this union of two natures in one person was effected, the influence of these two types of speculation is very clearly discernable. Were the two elements commingled, and how? Was the personality a human personality made divine by moral obedience, or was a divine one made human by condescension? It is useless to enter into these discussions here. Enough that at the bottom of them all lay this antagonism, if we may give it so harsh a name, between the religious theories of Greece and Persia, and that the church was satisfied when it had done its best to combine the two.

The belief in an Immaculate Conception is a necessary consequent

upon the doctrine of Incarnation, except when the Redeemer's body is a mere form, a shadow, an apparition-body visible only to the eye and made invisible at will, which was the opinion of the Doceta and of the writer of John's Gospel. In such a case as with Djenschid and Mithras, no birth at all is necessary. But the Grecian heroes were all born of virgins. To the mother of Hercules the seer Tiresias spoke, "Be of good cheer, thou mother of a glorious offspring: blessed art thou among Argine women," -almost the very words addressed by the angel to the virgin mother of Jesus.

The doctrines of Atonement held by the Catholic and Protestant churches were absolute creations of the schoolmen, as late as the eleventh century, and can therefore with no plausibility claim to be called Christian, unless by Christ we mean Anselm of Canterbury, and Thomas Aquinas.

The Christian doctrines respecting heaven and hell, the condition and destiny of departed spirits, angels and devils, and Satan the prince of devils, existed in Persia from time immemorial, and were brought thence, as everybody knows, by the Jews.

The Christian doctrine respecting human nature and the human lot is as ancient as the fabled origin of Zoroastrism, being a natural inference from the belief in a fall from primeval state of heaven. Philo's writings are full of passages that might be literally rendered into the formularies of the popular theology.

Plato likewise teaches unequivocally the doctrine of eternal punishment, and in the "Republic" describes the place of judgment, the judges with the souls of men assembled before them, and the two ways that to the right conducting the good to the seats of bliss, that to the left conducting the evil to the abode of misery. "If any New Testament doctrine" says Gfrörer, in his " Urchristenthum," "is of Alexandrine extraction, it is the doctrine of saving and effectual grace."

The Christian doctrine of Faith has its parallel, point for point, in the Platonic doctrine of Love. As Faith is at once of divine and human birth, on one side a gift of the divine grace, on the other side a voluntary direction of the human soul towards the infinite, so Love, according to Plato, has this twofold nature, being at the same the result of inspiration and of longing.

The origin of the Christian Sacraments is involved in some obscurity, but that they were derived from the ancient mysteries

admits now of little doubt. The early Fathers of the church confessed the resemblance between the symbols employed in the Mithras mysteries and those used at the supper. Tertullian allows their significance to be the same. Justin Martyr ascribes their identity to the influence of evil spirits. Von Hammer notes that the bloodless offering with bread and the cup is purely Persian. But the Christian Sacraments bear a closer analogy to the mysteries than is suggested by the mere identity of symbols. There is a near resemblance of meaning. As the mysteries had reference to the suffering deities of nature, so the sacraments have reference to the suffering god-man; life and death, sin and atonement, giving significance to the doctrines and rites of both. Christianity perceives the necessity of expressing its abstract thought in material forms, and selects the very same emblems which the ancient naturalism had invented. Water, the element of purification in the latter, is in Christianity the symbol of consecration to the higher life. Bread and wine, the representations in all the old religions of high life, spiritual truth, hold the same place in the Christian rite of "communion," as the emblems of that heavenly bread which feeds the soul, and of that heavenly vine whose juice is the lifeblood of each believer's heart. An additional proof that the sacraments of the church were suggested by the heathen mysteries, appears in the historical fact that, about the time of Constantine, a so-called "disciplina arcani," a secret or esoteric teaching, was formed, and intimately associated with the Supper, which received the character of the ancient mysteries!

Christianity's obligations to the elder religions for its symbols are extremely heavy, as any one, by reading Creuzer's "Symbolik," or Didron's "Iconographie Chretienne," may easily discover. Its cyphers and emblems and illustrations of Trinity, its representations of the virgin mother and child, are exactly copied from the Indian and Persian drawings. A painting at St. Reim in Rheims, of St. John the Evangelist, with a circular nimbus surrounded by two sun-flowers, is almost line for line like the numerous Egyptian figures, from the head of which two lotus flowers rise in a similar manner, with crossing stems. The cross which decorates the nimbus around the head of the Almighty, in some early paintings, corresponds curiously with the cross that decorates the halo surrounding the head of Buddhist and Hindu divinities, and is more likely to have been suggested by that than