les,
"In this world ye shall have tribulation." "Behold," He says, "I send
you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves"; "ye shall be hated of all
men for My sake"; "if any man will come after Me, let him deny
himself, and take up his cross and follow Me." His own life was one of
unparalleled contumely, and He told them they must not expect to fare
better than their Master. Nor did they. The majority of the apostles
met cruel deaths after lives of suffering. Paul, describing his
experience, speaks of his beatings and his perils among his countrymen
and the heathen, of his hunger and thirst and his cold and nakedness.
And his was only an extreme example of the common lot of the early
generations of Christians. Yet in the face of the hostility of the
whole Roman and Jewish world, manifested in the most cruel
persecutions, Christianity rapidly grew, gaining its most signal
triumphs, laying hold of the consciences and transforming the lives of
men. It was only when it came under the patronage of the civil
government, and the public opinion of the world was thrown in its
favor, and its peculiar doctrines became diluted with worldly policy,
that it began to lose its reforming influence--a fact which Mr. Mill
himself alludes to in his essay _On Liberty_. This experience has been
frequently repeated since the days of Constantine; so that history
fairly proves that Christianity does its peculiar work more
effectually _when it is dissociated from all human sanctions_, and
left to act solely by its intrinsic force. This is true not only of
the Church at large, but of individuals. Paul, Luther, a Kempis drew
their inspiration from the simple words of Christ, and owed next to
nothing to the opinions of the world about them. It has always been
direct contact with the life and precepts of the Founder of
Christianity that has fired the hearts and braced the spiritual
energies of the noblest Christians, who have been the reformers of
their times, braving the enmity of the world to instill a purer and a
loftier morality.

The illustrations, suggested first by Bentham, which Mr. Mill cites to
prove the worthlessness of the religious sanction--viz., the almost
universal breach of oaths where not enforced by law, and the
prevalence of male unchastity and the practice of dueling among
Christian communities--have no pertinency whatever to his argument,
since they only prove the predominance of religious infidelity and
indifference in countrie