power--not the arresting of the earth's motion--not the calling back of
the dead unto life, can approach in grandeur to this miracle which we
all daily behold; namely, the inconceivable mystery of having written
and sculptured upon the tablets of man's heart a new code of moral
distinctions, all modifying--many reversing--the old ones. What would
have been thought of any prophet, if he should have promised to
transfigure the celestial mechanics; if he had said, I will create a
new pole-star, a new zodiac, and new laws of gravitation; briefly, I
will make new earth and new heavens? And yet a thousand times more
awful it was to undertake the writing of new laws upon the spiritual
conscience of man. _Metanoeite_ (was the cry from the wilderness),
wheel into a new centre your moral system; _geocentric_ has that
system been up to this hour--that is, having earth and the earthly for
its starting-point; henceforward make it _heliocentric_ (that is,
with the sun, or the heavenly for its principle of motion).

2. A second remark of mine was, perhaps, not more important, but it
was, on the whole, better calculated to startle the prevailing
preconceptions; for, as to the new system of morals introduced by
Christ, generally speaking, it is too dimly apprehended in its great
differential features to allow of its miraculous character being
adequately appreciated; one flagrant illustration of which is furnished
by our experience in Affghanistan, where some officers, wishing to
impress Akhbar Khan with the beauty of Christianity, very judiciously
repeated to him the Lord's Prayer and the Sermon on the Mount, by both
of which the Khan was profoundly affected, and often recurred to them;
but others, under the notion of conveying to him a more
_comprehensive_ view of the Scriptural ethics, repeated to him the
Ten Commandments; although, with the sole exception of the two first,
forbidding idolatry and Polytheism, there is no word in these which