ant "loosed him," and another witness says that defendant "unloosed him." Such illustrations could be multiplied indefinitely. A striking instance of the figurative use of language is presented in the familar sentence, "Blackberries are red when they are green."

Cross-examination often serves to bring out truth from dark corners. The cross-examiner may test the memory of the witness, his judgment and powers of observation, his sincerity and ability to tell the same story twice. Crossexamination is an art in which few are proficient. A bungling advocate may by cross-examination simply allow a witness to emphasize his direct testimony by repeating it. Color-blindness in the witness, his illiteracy, his inability to tell the time by the court-room clock, and his incapacity to estimate size, weight, and distance may all be revealed by the skillful cross-examiner. A forger may be detected, as in the case of the Parnell letters printed in the London Times, by requiring the witness to write instantly in the presence of the jury five or six words all misspelled and with characteristic chirographic peculiarities both in the forged writing and in the written answer to counsel.

Finally, we notice the dangerous tendencies of idealization which make much early history purely mythical and romantic. We know more to-day about Roman antiquities than Livy knew. We believe that Romulus was a demigod invented by patriotic imagination to be glorified by Rome, and that Rome is not a monument to the genius of Romulus. The Madonna of Christian art is Greek, Roman, Italian, Dutch even, and anything but Jewish in racial physiognomy. The Man of Nazareth, of whose physical appearance we know nothing save that his parents were Hebrews, is never represented on canvas as a Jew, but generally as a Caucasian, or looking like Apollo, Mercury, or one of the Greek gods, our models of manly beauty. How difficult it is to write dispassionately of Oliver Cromwell and of Thomas Paine! Each was an ardent patriot. The man of the pen has suffered obloquy because he wrote the Age of Reason. His coarse and vulgar infidelity has eclipsed the splendor of his patriotic services. Friend of Washington and of Jefferson, conspicuous

figure in the public life of England, France, and America, Thomas Paine is unmentioned by many so-called historians, or else he is cruelly and wickedly maligned. And Cromwell, the man who ruled by the sword, killed the king, and set up a military despotism more odious than the Stuart monarchy, has been most foully depicted as void of every virtue and representative of every vice. Americans have idealized Washington, whose noble character, transcendent genius, and resplendent patriotism have led the greatest of Europeans to concede to him the loftiest eminence of human achievement. The supreme test of generalship is to command a retreat; but our patriotic historians will have it that Washington's conquering cohorts drove the enemy from the field in a long series of brilliant victories as they marched down the continent from Long Island to Yorktown. The addresses and state papers which bear his name have been accepted as sufficient to place Washington in the front rank of Americans as a scholar and man of letters. And, in spite of his vast wealth in land and slaves and his positively aristocratic temper, he is still regarded as the friend of the common people and "first in the hearts of his countrymen."

Stories are told by religious zealots, to the glory of God, of miraculous interventions in these later days in the cure of disease, in judgments of death visited on blasphemers, in the gift of tongues to saints, and in the supernatural endowment of the absolutely illiterate with the power to read the Bible but no other book. Does not the philosophy of myth suggest an explanation of these strange tales? May we not justly credit men with sincerity and at the same time recognize the difficulties in the way of proof?

Daac Franklin Russell

ART. V.-ST. PAUL AND SOCIAL RELATIONS. WITHIN the world caldron when St. Paul was born three nations were seething-the Roman, Greek, and Jewish. Though having little sympathy for each other—often, indeed, hating each other-the fires beneath were so hot that they were compelled to mix together. On the surface of this bubbling mass gathered a scum, dark, loathsome, sickening. poisoned the atmosphere and smelled to heaven.

It

The only political power was Rome. She had conquered the nations through the inheritance of that simplicity of life and manners, that hard-headed common sense, and that ability for fine legal distinctions and statesmanship which characterized the early days of her history. She governed now with a fine Italian hand. The Greek was without a country, but his influence was everywhere. "The sway of Greek customs and of the Hellenic tongue," says Döllinger, "maintained and extended itself continually from the Euphrates to the Adriatic. Like a mighty stream rushing forward in every direction, Hellenism had there overspread all things." Yes, the Greek was everywhere, and everywhere his influence was pernicious. His culture had sunk into an animalism glossed over with fine sayings and beautiful forms. His art had become a ministry to bestiality. Juvenal characterized the Greek as

The flattering, cringing, treacherous, artful race,

Of fluent tongue and never-blushing face

A protean tribe, one knows not what to call,
That shifts to every form and shines in all.

The other chief element of the Roman world was the Jew. Like the Greek, he traveled far and wide. Like his descendant of to-day, he was driven by persecution and led by opportunities for trade. At the beginning of the Christian era he had made his influence particularly felt in the two world capitals-Alexandria and Rome. To the former he had been attracted on account of the exceptional privileges granted his countrymen by Alexander. He occupied a special quarter and was exceedingly prosperous in all his financial affairs. It was a banker of that city who contributed the gold and silver

for the nine massive gates which led into the temple at Jerusalem. Edersheim tells us that the central synagogue in Alexandria was so large that a signal was needed for those most distant to know the proper moment for the responses. From Alexandria Egyptian Jews had spread southward to Abyssinia and Ethiopia and westward to Cyrene and beyond. In Rome, as in Alexandria, special sections were assigned to Jews. In their poor quarter across the Tiber might be seen hawkers of all descriptions-sellers of glass, old clothes, and secondhand wares. It is estimated that in the time of Augustus the Jews in Rome numbered forty thousand, and during the reign of Tiberius half as many more. But not only was the Jew largely represented in Alexandria and Rome; he was to be seen in almost every important center, engaged, as now, in large commercial enterprises, and on account of his wealth often patronized by statesmen and rulers. His religion, however, exposed him to the contempt of the great, who believed that he had no right, now that his country had been subjugated, to a faith so uncompromising and exclusive; and of the masses, who were too ignorant to understand him. This opposition served only to deepen the regard of the Jew for the home land-for Jerusalem, the center of his political, social, and religious hopes. He was in the world and forced to adjust himself in a measure to its thousand customs, yet he was not of it in any vital sense.

With such a mixture of Roman, Greek, and Jew as principal elements-together with Gaul, Celt, Phoenician, Chaldean, Arab, Persian, Egyptian, Moor, Carthaginian, Iberian, and others-what shall be said as to the social, moral, and religious status of the empire as a whole? Something can be said both for and against. Nearly all students of the history of those times will agree with the statement of Friedländer that "at no time, down to the beginning of the present century, has it been possible to make journeys with so much ease, safety, and rapidity as in the first centuries of the imperial era." The magnificent roads, though constructed for the rapid transfer of troops, became the highways for the interchange of national ideas and the means of national intercourse. It may be said, also, with equal truth, that never before had the science of government reached so high

a state, nor had law ever before been administered with so impartial a hand. Whatever the Roman might be in his social and moral relations he never lost his deep sense of justice, nor those powers of keen analysis and synthesis which made Roman administration something to be respected and feared wherever the Roman eagles had penetrated. All this had a marvelous unifying influence. "Rome was conceived by many," says Professor Fisher, "as the realization of the universal city, as the common country of the race," and along with this conviction there is noted the dawning of the conception of a universal brotherhood. Stoicism, teaching a citizenship of the world, greatly stimulated this feeling of brotherhood. Lucan, who died A. D. 65, called upon mankind to lay down the weapons of war and to love one another, and Plutarch affirmed that his country was in whatever part of the world he might happen to be. Much more might in justice be said for the civilization of the first century. On the other hand, it cannot be denied that society as a whole was gradually sinking into a slough of false thought, cruel social conditions, and reeking immorality. "To see the world in its worst state," says Professor Jowett, "we turn to the age of the satirists and Tacitus, when all the different streams of evil, coming from east, west, north, and south, the vices of barbarism and the vices of civilization, remnants of ancient cults and the latest refinements of luxury and impurity, met and mingled on the banks of the Tiber." Religion had gradually decayed from a life into a theology, and from a theology into formalism, and from formalism into an excuse for wholesale license. The number of the gods increased beyond all reckoning. The spiritual office became sosecularized that ecclesiastical advancement came to depend wholly upon political influence. Stoicism, though rising nobly to the thought of the universal brotherhood of man and teaching doctrines which Christianity is not ashamed to proclaim, was egoistic, individualistic, pantheistic; without love, without a true conception of a Father in heaven, without a method for, or even a conception of, the regeneration of the individual or of society. Holding a subjective serenity as the ideal, it was essentially a philosophy of despair. Its noblest advocate, Seneca, defended suicide, saying, "If the house smokes, go out of it."