as the Son, and sent of God,—sent from Heaven to declare his will on earth, and with the love of an elder brother, to win us on to the attainment of an exalted state of happiness, which we had forfeited,—sent to suffer and intercede for benighted wanderers, who were outcasts from their Father's house; can we conceive mingled feelings of gratitude, adoration, and love, more fervent, and more powerfully commanding the soul and imagination of man, than those which must then have been excited by this primitive promulgation of the Gospel? Such converts, too, were called from the uncertain hope (if hope it might be termed) of a dreary, listless, inactive existence after death, so little desirable, that their greatest poet makes his chief hero declare, he would prefer being the meanest hind who breathes the upper air, to the highest honours of that dismal state.
"Through the thick gloom his friend Achilles knew,
And as he speaks the tears descend in dew:
Com'st thou alive to view the Stygian bounds,
Where the wan spectres walk eternal rounds;
Nor fear'st the dark and dismal waste to tread,
Throng'd with pale ghosts, familiar with the dead?
To whom with sighs: I pass these dreadful gates
To seek the Theban, and consult the Fates:
For still distress'd I roam from coast to coast,
Lost to my friends, and to my country lost.
