II. The grandeur and divinity of its effects on mankind.

I. We may form some conception of the rapidity of its spread, by the extent of its progress in the apostolic era. It was speedily diffused through Jerusalem, the camp of its enemy. It penetrated the phalanx of the priests and Pharisees,-many of whose chiefs were enrolled among its faithful witnesses. It travelled through Judea; penetrated into Samaria; and into the Southern and Eastern regions, as far as Ethiopia and India. It travelled, in the greatness of its might, into the North ; through Asia Minor: Asia Minor: westward through Greece, Illyricum, into Italy, and Spain, and Gaul, and Britain, even to the remotest Thule of the Northern Ocean.

And its triumphs were not achieved after the manner of Mohammed, or of Antichrist, who employed the force of arms, or compromised with heathen nations, by exchanging and adopting their religion, by giving merely a new nomenclature to the baptized idols of India and China. Nor were they accomplished under the smiles of princes, or temporal advantages. These apostolical men had every difficulty to encounter. The Jews raged; the heathens excited tumults; philosophers wrote against them; poets satirized them; orators declaimed against them; consuls, governors,

kings, emperors, combined for their destruction: they denounced; proscribed; outlawed; persecuted; murdering and massacring the Christians!

But all this hostility was in vain. Their efforts to subdue Christianity, or even to stop the progress of the flood of its light and glory ever rolling onward with the rapidity of Messiah's chariot of salvation, were utterly powerless. They were as the idle efforts of a child who exults in his attempt to oppose, with a handful of pebbles and a mound of sand, the motion of the mighty ocean, upheaving, and pouring forth his rushing waves in a full spring tide! The Almighty reigned. The worms of the dust cannot oppose omnipotence, nor derange a single movement of his providence. "The heathen raged; the kingdoms were moved; he uttered his voice the earth melted!"

And II. The effects of the gospel were as marvellous as its progress was rapid. Darkness had covered the world as with an impenetrable veil; wickedness and cruelty had borne universal sway; frightful superstition, and idolatry the most revolting, had long held the human soul in their triple chains. Here was Egypt, with her brutish idols! There Greece and Rome, with their 30,000 gods and human sacrifices! There, Western Europe,

with her Wodin, and her Thor, whose votaries drank from the skulls of the fallen foe! There, Asia with her Diana, and her Moloch with his infernal rites, perpetuated to this day in the pollutions and cruelties of Juggernaut !

But the gospel came. The day-spring from on high dawned on the night of the gentile world. The dark clouds of delusion and superstition, which none of all the sons of science could disperse, or bring back the sun, began forthwith to break, and roll away. The glorious SUN of Righteousness burst forth in his heaven-born light over the nations. The nations beheld him in his new and unseen glory. They admired; they bowed down before him; they adored. And forthwith, deserting their blood-stained altars, and casting down their idols from their high places, they prostrated themselves at the feet of the only living and true God, the only Saviour of a lost world. And lifting Messiah's cross, they cheerfully followed him in holiness and new obedience !

The universal change induced upon their minds, and all their actions, evinced the unquestionable sincerity of the converted multitudes. The varied graces reigned in their hearts, and shone with a brilliant lustre in their new deportment. Pure and exalted knowledge reared her throne on the ruins of a fabulous

mythology. Faith assumed her reign, where superstitious credulity had tyrannized. Hope shed her beams of joy and rapture, where the long agonies of despair had withered every fair prospect. Virtue and integrity displaced the vices nourished by selfishness and deceit. Temperance and purity rose triumphantly over bacchanalian revellings, and incontinence; universal benevolence, over the chilling blight of avarice; sweet charity over envy and malice; patience and quiet submission over turbulence and rebellion; Christian meekness over savage ferocity; godliness over universal corruption; and holy devotion over the atrocious acts of superhuman idolatry!

These were the blessed changes wrought in transcendent beauty, and loveliness, wherever the gospel of the Messiah found a welcome. There was no exception of character. The prince and the beggar, the learned and the peasant, the bond and the free, were all equally welcomed, and impartially blessed! Zion looked forth as the morning; fair as the moon; clear as the sun; and terrible as an army marching majestically forward, under its wide-spread banner, to take possession of all lands!

And many an ancient man of God there was, in those days of Zion's glory, who saw-or, thought he saw in this continuous

succession of triumphs, the dawn of the latter day glory. And already he began joyfully to hail the immediate advent of Jehovah in his millennial reign. For not unfrequently does it happen, that striking events, though comparatively small, appear incomparably great and vast, when near ;—and just for this reason that they are near our view, and presented to our excited minds. The grander and brighter objects afar off, are lost in the lesser glory of smaller, but nearer objects. These ancient Christians beheld in these wonderful triumphs, the dawn of that glory, when the light of the moon is to be as the light of the sun, and the light of the sun as seven days in one. They already saw, in glowing imagination, the mountain of the Lord's house established in the top of the mountains, and exalted above the hills. In the multitudes hastening in crowds to the hill of Zion, they saw all nations flocking into it. In the peace and unity of the thousands around them, they hailed the long looked-for day, when the wolf was to dwell with the lamb, and the leopard with the kid. And in the charming visions of vast congregations of the saints, walking in the beauties of holiness, they saw "the first resurrection of souls," and the heavenly host descending to earth again; and angels and glorified saints mingling in a new communion with men upon earth!