not only found a response in the thoughts of the Jews, but in after days it bore fruit in the thoughts of Christians themselves, until the belief that Jesus was offered as a vicarious sacrifice for the sins of others became incorporated in the doctrines of Christendom. When fairly and fearlessly examined, one cannot evade the conclusion that the acceptance of this doctrine is a virtual endorsement of the inhuman practices of paganism, and that it springs from the same false conception of Deity. The beloved Teacher of Israel was not a scapegoat for humanity, and it is unjust to the Father to regard Him as a party to the tragedy on Calvary. The abhorrent practice of offering human sacrifices to appease the anger of the gods has been rightly condemned by the advancing thought of the race; but the teaching that the sacrifice of Jesus was necessary to placate an offended Deity, or to reconcile Him with sinful humanity, is on a level with the worst phases of paganism in its darkest age.

Was the seed of the woman, which had blossomed into such abundant promise in the life and ministry of Christ Jesus, to become a victim of the serpent's enmity, and were the blessings which his revelation of God as the Father held for mankind to be lost in the crude savagery of a pagan sacrifice? This was a momentous question. It is true that Jesus was offered as a sacrifice, but it was on the altar of the carnal mind's hatred of the spiritual truth which he taught, and was of a nature to appease the wrath of devils, not of Deity. Indeed, the latter belief was obviously self-contradictory, since anger, by its own testimony, is not a godly attribute. The theory that the murder of the great Nazarene expiated the sins of mortals is but a repetition of pagan superstition in Christian terms, and has done more, perhaps, than any other one thing to deaden human conscience to the necessity of individual atonement and reformation.

The sacrifice of the human Jesus on the cross was as palpably futile to relieve mortals of their own moral responsibilities as was the blood of a bull or a sheep to absolve the Israelites from their transgressions. It is the

sacrifice of their animality and sin, not the life of animals or of men, which God requires of mortals, and this it is certain no vicarious offering can provide. In his crucifixion and resurrection, Jesus furnished conclusive evidence of man's oneness with God, but his individual experience did not lessen the demand that each mortal must sometime and in some way do likewise. The foundation of Christianity was not the martyrdom of its Founder, but the truth which his teaching and example brought to the recognition of humanity. It required no human or animal sacrifice on the part of Abraham to establish the verity of the God of Israel; and it required no sacrifice of human life for Jesus to establish the verity of the Father's presence in healing the sick and in raising the dead.

We learn from the Scriptures that man, in his true estate, is not at war with his Creator, but is the son of God, always inseparable from the Father. To bring to humanity a working knowledge of this saving truth was the Messiah's mission, not to be personally deified, or to be offered as a propitiatory sacrifice. The religion which Jesus taught and practised, and which he expected his followers to practise and perpetuate, was not a sanctified paganism. Christianity was the crown and glory of the highest spiritual thought of Israel which had preceded it, but it had nothing in common with heathen conceptions of Deity, nor with the beliefs and practices which grew out of them. Both the deification and sacrifice of human beings bear the stamp of the purest paganism, and the leopard can change his spots as readily as these practices can transform themselves into the exercises of enlightened religion.

In his vision at Patmos St. John beheld the perils which Christianity would encounter, and a second captivity or banishment which was to overtake the Church, or spiritual Israel. In the twelfth chapter of the Apocalypse, the serpent appears as "a great red dragon," waiting to destroy the child which should be born of the woman. Failing in this, the dragon persecuted the

woman, until she fled into the wilderness, where she was to be protected from "the face of the serpent" for a period of 1260 days, equivalent in prophetic time to the same number of years. In this passage, the woman has been interpreted as signifying the spirituality of the early Church, which had been gradually diminishing until it practically disappeared from the external structure or organization.

We have seen how the serpent began to persecute the woman when it was found impossible to destroy the Christ by crucifying the human Jesus. The divine feature of the new faith was its spirituality, and it was naturally against this that the carnal mind would direct its antagonism, for in its spiritual element lay the vital force of Christianity. Let the spirituality of the new religion be submerged in materialism, and its power to uplift and redeem men would be lost. In such an event, evil would naturally find nothing to resist. The aims and tendencies of Christianity and worldliness find no common atmosphere in which to thrive, strive hard as mortals may to mingle them. The carnal mind felt no enmity towards the religions of paganism, human sacrifices and all. It did not oppose the introduction of pagan rites into the religion of Israel. All that evil has opposed is whatever tends to spiritualize the thoughts of humanity, and thus to establish the sovereignty of good in the consciousness of men.

The spiritual decline and captivity of Israel had been accomplished by the inflow of paganism into the inner life of the nation, and the carnal mind was now at work to counteract in the same way the spiritual influence of Christianity, but so quietly and insidiously as to lull Christendom to sleep over what was taking place. Notwithstanding the plain and insistent precepts and injunctions uttered by the Master regarding the essentials of the Christian life, and the indispensable conditions of discipleship, the opinions and interpretations of church leaders became accredited as definitions of Christianity. These personal views, afterwards authorized as creeds

of the Church, were more or less colored by influences not derived from the Founder of Christianity, but from the religious traditions and practices of both Jew and Gentile.

The adoption of the ancient pagan superstition of vicarious human sacrifice as a prominent feature of church doctrine, logically led to the belief that human salvation could be realized without individual self-sacrifice and reformation. The deification of the person of Jesus, in direct contradiction of his own statements to the contrary, was another notable instance of pagan influence, as can be seen by an examination of early profane history. This doctrine contravenes the fundamental truth of Israel, that God is One, and soon led to the deification of Jesus' mother as well. This dogma of the divinity of the fleshly Jesus removed him from that human kinship into which he had invited all who follow him in deed, and placed his example upon an altitude to which Christians may not logically aspire. The stamp of evil is plainly visible in the consequences of these teachings. The spirituality of first-century Christianity began to be replaced by adherence to the letter of church doctrines, and by a zealous devotion to the person of its Founder. As the Jews could not see the Messiah because of their hatred of the personal Jesus, so Christians, conversely, began to lose sight of the spiritual Christ in their worship of the man, until their adoration of the great Teacher gradually overshadowed the vital importance of obeying his teachings.

The healing of the sick, which had been such a conspicuous feature of Jesus' ministry, was continued by the disciples after his ascension, and became a normal activity of the Church in its earlier history; but with the injection into its life of false and unregenerative teaching, like unsuspected virus, and torn by contending factions, the spiritual sensibility of the Church became more and more benumbed until its healing office finally ceased to function.

What had taken the place of this vital feature of

Christian faith? Turning away from this divine nourishment, this fruit of the Christianity authorized and established by its Founder, upon what could the church feed and prosper?

The formal adoption of Christianity by the Emperor Constantine, and its establishment as the state religion, generally acclaimed as a triumph for the Church, only left it stranded in the meshes of worldly favor and prosperity. It relinquished its purely sacred character to become a political factor in the empire, its offices being the object of ambition and intrigue, while the emperor's decisions became the final word in its councils. The rise of the papacy succeeded in gathering the Church under its control until in 606 A.D. the Emperor Phocas decreed Pope Boniface III to be head of all the churches of Christendom. It has been stated by some writers that at this period the spirituality of the Church had practically disappeared. The woman had fled into the wilderness, to reappear in the fulness of time.