THE SERMON BY HIS GRACE THE ARCHBISHOP OF YORK, PREACHED IN S. MARTIN'S CHURCH, LEICESTER, ON TUESDAY, SEPT. 28TH, 1880. "Now if we be dead with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with Him."-Romans vi. 8. THE first century after the crucifixion is at once the most eventful and the most obscure age of the Church's history:-eventful, for the Church emerges from it with her four Gospels, which have preserved for ever the living image of Christ, with the Epistles of St. Paul, which are at once the history of a man and of the state of many churches, with a worship almost complete, and with a hold upon the pagan world marvellous in its power and its results:-obscure, for this great growth took place with a kind of unconsciousness. We have no account of the actual writing of any Gospel, and are discussing at the present moment the when and the where. Of the growth of the Church's spiritual power we can judge from certain hints; but there is nothing to prepare us for what Trajan found, when he ascertained that the adolescent religion had emptied the temples of the declining paganism. The Acts of the Apostles tell us much; they are a precious record; yet still, most of the mighty growth which shall overshadow the earth went on secretly and in darkness. Historians have no word to say about Christianity; they confound in their careless survey Christian and Jew. The Jewish land, looking westward over the great tideless lake round which the civilisation of the world was spread, with Egypt and Africa on the left, Greece and Rome and Gaul on A |