interests of thousands may be compromised or endangered even by his lightest word. Surely no less responsibility is involved in the functions of the man who hopes to sustain the solemn position of the angel,' or the messenger of Christ to His Church. As a matter of course, such a man anticipates suffering and anxiety; he must expect at times the bitter grief of having run in vain, and laboured in vain ; he must anticipate the agonies of doubt lest he should have obscured or travestied his master's message, lest all the worst characteristics of his own religious experience and inner life should be repeated and exaggerated in the life and experience of those to whom he ministers; lest Christ should, after all, be more compromised than represented in the feeble service which he tries to render to Him.

It is well sometimes to strip these Apostolic Churches of the poetry which the haze of centuries has thrown around them, and to look below the nimbus which our faith and reverence have wreathed about the brows of these early confessors. It is desirable that we should see how much of flesh and blood and common-place life did lie under all the proceedings of the Christians of the first century; it is well to discover the many points where our feelings and fears, our mistakes and jealousies, our shortcomings and sins, our mixture of motives, our ordinary virtues, and even our unspiritual character do very strongly resemble what we learn of these fathers and founders of the Church. It is desirable

for us sometimes to scrutinize the actual features of the Church of Christ as the Apostles left it, to inquire into the life that was lived by those first converts from heathenism, and to estimate the heroism of the first preachers of the Word of God in Asia. It is well to ask what was the character of the practical Christianity that has converted the world, what we should have seen if we had faced it in those cities of pro-consular Asia, even while the mighty spirit of John was still lingering upon the earth, and the Holy One still stood within the cloud-veils of Patmos. Would it have been anything essentially different from that which modern missionaries now see in India and in China? Let us thread the streets of Ephesus, the abode of learned leisure and wild superstition, and search out the school of Tyrannus, or the disused Jewish synagogue in which the troubled Church of Nazarenes has met for worship. One thing will be very obvious as we view this little Christian assembly, that as yet the Christian faith has produced no deep effect upon the masses of the people. Heathenism still has the wealth, the fashion, and the philosophy. All the shops in the principal bazaars, the façades of the theatre and of the pro-consular palace, are still decorated with symbols of heathen worship, and processions of pilgrims from all parts of the world are ever pouring in to worship at the shrine of the Great Goddess Diana.' Let us glance at the assembly; it consists, for the most part, of the poor. There are few of the noble, or the wealthy; not many

pundits, nor priests, nor men of high caste; while the Roman governor and his suite are certainly innocent enough of knowing anything about Christianity. In the estimation of far-sighted, long-headed men of the world, these Christians are guilty of a fanatic morality, and the worship of nothing that the vulgar eye could see or comprehend. They are setting forth strange gods, and with sacrilegious hands are attacking the worship, the temples, the institutions, and traditions of antiquity. To compare Christianity, or its influence, or its promises, with the mighty myths and gorgeous worship of the immortal gods, was considered, by hundreds of men who were as clever as the town-clerk of Ephesus, a simple absurdity. The Christian Church was even less conspicuous at Smyrna than at Ephesus; there it probably worshipped in some cave by the sea-shore, and consisted of a few sailors and workmen who were poor, unknown, and without influence. At Laodicea alone we may conjecture the presence of wealth and respectability, and a splendid erection, beautiful as one of their own Grecian temples, in which worshippers who were increased with goods and had need of nothing, were adorned according to the fashions of the day, in flowing robes of finest linen, girded with golden chains, and fragrant with Oriental perfumes, and were complacently saying to themselves, ‘Our new and holy religion is doing wonders here, is commanding respect and receiving homage.' We know what Jesus thought of the poverty-stricken Smyrnese,

and of the prosperous Laodiceans. Neither in the one nor the other was it very conspicuous that the fulcrum had been discovered by which the Saviour was going to move the world. In both these and in other of the sister Churches there was the presence of certain dangerous moral heresy. It was a miserable effort to cloke licentiousness with the gospel of Christ. The new converts needed the closest watching, lest they should abuse the grace of God, mistake the purpose of their redemption, and be ignorant of the Spirit which they had professedly received; in fact, lest they should forget that they were purged from their old sins. We see even in Apostolic times the germs of the fearful forms of heresy and speculation which harassed the Church for two hundred years. Heathenism was then, as now, eagerly seizing some of the ideas of Christianity and perverting them to its own use, and even making them the palliations of gross cruelty and licentiousThese unnatural combinations were then, as they now are, often too conspicuous, and actually made more appearance than the quiet humble work of that kingdom which is within men; so that the partially-informed critic has often said, ' Here is your Christianity! This is the result of your missions !'

ness.

The social relations of heathendom between master and slave, husband and wife, parents and children, presented in Apostolic times almost insuperable barriers to success. The peoples were, moreover, always on the verge of some great political change, which

might entirely upset all Christian work. The mighty spiritual change in society which they anticipated for the world, lay afar off, beyond the utmost range of their lives. Let us look at the angels, the ministers, the missionaries of Christ and His Church, who were presiding over these infant communities. There is nothing to shew that they were men of colossal abilities, or transcendent excellence. They were average in their moral tone, and in their spiritual life and power of service. There was nothing so magnificent as the zeal of Martyn, the perseverance of Livingstone, the saintly power of Brainerd; but it was by means of such men as these that the Christianity of the first century became the salvation of the world. It was God's work and God's way. He chose the weak things of the world and of the Church to confound the things that were mighty. It was less than seventy years after the ascension of Jesus when we obtain this bird's-eye view of the Church, its organs, elements, and prospects; and comparing these with the work of the last seventy years, since the idea of Protestant missions first took possession of the Church of Christ, I think we have reason to take heart and hope from the comparison. I can, indeed, imagine a missionary beginning his work in a heathen land, with his heart overflowing with strong emotion, for which he has no adequate scope. A few children, a convert from some neighbouring station, an unsatisfactory servant or two, or a group of curious listeners, constitute the merest