articular,
every word, every effort, every act, demonstrate that he was agitated
with new instincts and misgivings of some shadowy revelation opening
upon man, that his heart was convulsed with desponding anxiety in the
first place to save the man who appeared the depositary of this
revelation, but who, if, after all, only a sublime lunatic, was, at the
very least, innocent of all offence. It must have struck all close
observers of early Christianity how large a proportion of the new
converts lay amongst Roman officers, or (to speak more adequately)
amongst Romans of high rank, both men and women. And for that there was
high reason. In the advance of civilization, and in the corresponding
decay of idolatrous religions, there was fast arising a new growth of
cravings amongst men. Mythological and desperately immoral religions,
that spoke only to the blind sense of power, had been giving way through
the three previous centuries to a fearful extent. They had receded from
the higher natures of both Greece and Rome as the sea has locally
receded from many shores of the earth. Such natures were left 'miserably
bare'; the sense of dependency by any tie upon the invisible world, or
at least upon the supernatural world, had decayed, and unless this
painful void were filled up by some supplementary bond in the same
direction, a condition of practical atheism must take place, such as
could not but starve and impoverish in human nature those yearnings
after the infinite which are the pledges of all internal grandeur. But
this dependency could not be replaced by one of the same vicious nature.
Into any new dependency a new element must be introduced. The sense of
insufficiency would be renewed in triple strength if merely the old
relations of weakness to power, of art to greater art, of intellect to
higher intellect, of less to more within the same exact limits as to
kind of excellence, should be rehearsed under new names or improved
theogonies. Hitherto, no relation of man to divine or demoniac powers
had included the least particle or fraction or hint of any moral
element; nor was such an element possible in that dependency, for
profound reasons.

_IX. WHAT SCALIGER SAYS ABOUT THE EPISTLE TO JUDE._

Before any canon was settled, many works had become current in Christian
circles whose origin was dubious. The traditions about them varied
locally. Some, it is alleged, that would really have been entitled to a
canonical pla