unworldliness and unambition: they wish only to be recognised as
peaceable subjects, as citizens and as equals: but if once they grow
strong enough, they will discover that their spears and swords are
the symbol of their Lord's return from heaven; that he now at length
commissions them to eject you, as vile infidels, from all seats of
power,--to slay you with the sword, if you dare to offer sacrifice to
the immortal gods,--to degrade you so, that you shall only not enter
the senate, or the privy council of the prince, or the judgment seat,
but not even the jury-box, or a municipal corporation, or the pettiest
edileship of Italy; nay, you shall not be lieutenants of armies, or
tribunes, or anything above the lowest centurion. You shall become a
plebeian class,--cheap bodies to be exposed in battle or to toil in
the field, and pay rent to the lordly Christian. Such shall be the
fate of _you_, the worshippers of Quirinus and of Jupiter Best and
Greatest, if you neglect to crush and extirpate, during the weakness
of its infancy, this ambitious and unscrupulous portent of a
religion.--Oh, how would Paul have groaned in spirit, at accusations
such as these, hateful to his soul, aspersing to his churches, but
impossible to refute! Either Paul's doctrine was a fond dream, (felt
I,) or it is certain, that he would have protested with all the force
of his heart against the principle that Christians _as such_ have any
claim to earthly power and place; or that they could, when they gained
a numerical majority, without sin enact laws to punish, stigmatize,
exclude, or otherwise treat with political inferiority the Pagan
remnant. To uphold such exclusion, is to lay the axe to the root of
the spiritual Church, to stultify the apostolic preaching, and at this
moment justify Mohammedans in persecuting Christians. For the Sultan
might fairly say,--"I give Christians the choice of exile or death: I
will not allow that sect to grow up here; for it has fully warned me,
that it will proscribe my religion in my own land, as soon as it has