spectacle; with one glance of the eye we saw the remains of ancient Latin grandeur and the most remarkable works of art of modern Rome. The sun, which had just risen, gave a new aspect to the country. It brought out the various shades of verdure better, revealed the slightest sinuosities of the valleys, bills, grottoes, rocks, little country houses, modest villas, and isolated towers, by which we were surrounded. By degrees, as the day stole on, arose the hum of people's voices, the tinkling of bells, the horn of the shepherds, the bleating of the goats, and the bellow of bulls, to animate the silent beauty of the scene we were contemplating. In thinking that I beheld this sublime spectacle for, perhaps, the last time, tears came into my eyes, and I felt my heart full of sorrow and regret. Adieu, beautiful country of my childhood! Adieu, beloved Italy, fatally doomed to slavery! It is because I have loved thee too well that I rist now tear myself away from thee! May our misfortunes be at least an expiation. May the future tell thee some day of the many tears shed, of the blood spilt by thy children for thy deliverance and regeneration. I descended the mountain, leaning on the arm of my faithful companion. Her presence of mind restored me to calmness. I felt that amidst the misfortunes which were reserved for me in exile, the most essential part of my happiness remained. * We left the Roman states towards the end of autumn, and directed our steps towards Tuscany. * I did not know the deeper grief which was reserved for me in this wandering life. It was in Corsica, where we went after leaving Tuscany, that Seraphina felt, for the first time, the symptoms of that terrible malady, which was to make such rapid inroads on her. I cannot speak now of France, of the Balearic Isles, which successively received the poor dying one. Neither the climate, nor my care, nor the wish to live, could triumph over consumption. She died in my arms. It was for me a second and more painful exile. The efforts and fatigues that she had voluntarily imposed on herself, to procure my liberty, had occasioned too great an expenditure of energy. * After having carried for some time into the different countries of Europe my grief and desolation, I profited by the amnesty given by the successor of Gregory XVI., and returned to Rome. I hastened to see Italy again; the sympathy that I found in my family, the movement which was then being made in favour of Italian independence, all seemed to promise a happy alleviation of my grief. I do not wish to enter into the details of a struggle which ended so sadly. After the events of 1847, I was again obliged to expatriate myself; and it is at the moment of embarking for America and of commencing a new career, that I throw this last look upon my past life and upon shores which I shall never again behold! In this narrative may be seen more than one feature in the life of the Roman youth at a recent epoch,—that want of energy, that indecision, and those trifles, those useless imprudencies, and a life sacrificed in the follies of a student;-in all these we see unfortunately the character and history of the modern Roman people. The Sinlessness of Jesus. S. R. 'Now here we see a young man, but little more than thirty years old, with no advantage of position; the son and companion of rude people; born in a town whose inhabitants were wicked to a proverb; of a nation above all others distinguished for their superstition, for national pride, exaltation of themselves, and contempt for all others; in an age of singular corruption, when the substance of religion had faded out from the mind of its anointed ministers, and sin had spread wide among a turbulent people, oppressed and down-trodden; a man ridiculed for his lack of knowledge, in this nation of forms, of hypocritical priests, and corrupt people, falls back on simple morality, simple religion; unites in himself the sublimest precepts and divinest practices, thus more than realizing the dream of prophets and sages; rises free from all prejudice of his age, nation, or sect; gives free range to the Spirit of God in his breast; sets aside the law, sacred and timehonoured as it was, its forms, its sacrifices, its temple, and its priests; puts away the doctors of the law, subtle, learned, irrefragable; and pours out a doctrine, beautiful as the light, sublime as Heaven, and true as God. The philosophers, the poets, the prophets, the rabbis,— he rises above them all. Yet Nazareth was no Athens, where philosophy breathed in the circumambient air; it had neither Porch or Lyceum, not even a school of the prophets. There is God in the heart of this youth. . . . . . Here was the greatest soul of all the sons of men; one before whom the majestic mind of Grecian sages and of Hebrew seers must veil its face.' Men have quarrelled, fought, and burnt each other over the question of Christ's nature, and Christ's teaching or doctrine; but unanimously almost, from the Pope of Rome down to Theodore Parker (from whom our quotation is taken), they have agreed that the character of Christ was transcendently perfect. But, even as the purest marble statue is sometimes seen spotted with the touch of insects, so some of the smallest of the tribe of infidels have touched the perfect life of Christ, and have attempted to leave the mark of their own impurity behind them. But the great body of even unbelievers have knelt before that incarnation of spotless purity, and have acknowledged it to be divinely perfect. Now this universal homage to the sinlessness of Christ is a remark able fact; remarkable on many grounds, but especially on this, that the character of Christ is altogether unique, nothing before or since ever having approached it within an infinite distance; and is not only supernatural, but truly and properly miraculous. For that there should arise a being having the nature of man, and yet not only perfectly free from all actual sin, but free also from the hereditary taint and bias towards sin, while every other individual of the race was a victim to the power of sin, this surely is a true miracle in the most proper sense of that word. Here was an interruption to the natural course of human nature; a suspension of the ordinary laws of human character; and yet men who flout the idea of a miracle in the natural world, who ridicule inspiration as involving a miracle in the intellectual world, have accepted this miracle of a sinless life without hesitation. It will be interesting for us to inquire, what there was in the character of Christ which has now for him the supreme place he occupies as the Holy One; and then to make some attempt to ascertain what there was in his nature to account for his exemption from the ordinary corruption of human life. Before Christ appeared the purest moralists of antiquity had never conceived the idea of such a life and character as his; and now that he has been here, we find it impossible to describe or paint the divine beauty of what he did and said. Painters have striven to put on canvas the countenance of the Saviour; yet we have never seen one to satisfy us, as expressing what must have been in that face. They have given intellectual faces, faces filled with love and meekness, agonized with suffering, faces of feminine beauty, but we cast them all away from us as tantalizing failures, with the feeling that the great original was beyond all the efforts of art and genius. A similar failure waits upon the attempt to describe in poetry or prose that sublime mind and character. We fall back from our highest conceptions, and own that such knowledge is too wonderful for us; it is high, we cannot attain unto it. A full and perfect sympathy with Christ would alone enable us to present a satisfying portraiture of him; but the depth and range of his sympathies were such as to preclude us from fully understanding his nature. If a hero should write the life of a hero, an artist the life of an artist, a politician the life of a politician, a sinless man alone would describe, in the dialect of a world free from sin, the thoughts and deeds of Christ. The Gospels are but fragmentary sketches; that is all they claim to be; only one or two incidents of his life up to the age of thirty are mentioned. What a longing have we often felt that we could lift the veil of the daily life at Nazareth during all those years he spent there; that we could see him as a child with other children; whether he mingled as a boy with other boys, and how; and when he became a young man, what were his ways, and habits, and speech, with those around him-parents, brethren, and neighbours. The unwritten life of Christ affords to some minds subjects of absorbing meditation, just because the written life is so full of the grandest interest. The first words spoken of him and by him in the Gospels, inspire us with a sense of his greatness; yet not distinctively intellectual greatness; for though that was an element of all his utterances and deeds, we feel that it was but the fitting medium to reveal the grandeur of his moral and religious nature. Wist ye not that I must be about my Father's business,' was his calm answer to his mother when she found him in the temple disputing with the doctors. An ordinary youth of great intellectual endowments would have come away from such a contest flushed with the sense of victory over his superiors; but though but little more than a child at the time, he had already apprehended his vocation, and felt the 'Father's business' was the great work of life. The religious, and not the intellectual, interest of the incident was uppermost in his mind. We shall not attempt to prove that Christ was perfectly sinless; we shall assume that, and simply say that he claimed sinlessness in the challenge he gave to his adversaries- Which of you convinceth me of sin?-and that he produced the conviction that he was sinless on those who had the most intimate knowledge of him. He was holy, harmless, undefiled, separate from sinners.' 'He was tempted in all points, like as we are, yet without sin.' The sting of his betrayer's sin was, that he had traitorously sold 'innocent blood.' We wish to call attention to some characteristics of his holy life. 1. It was not asceticism. He came eating and drinking.' Joha the Baptist lived in the desert, had his raiment of camel's hair, and a leathern girdle about his loins, and his food was locusts and wild honey. He only came among men to preach repentance and righteousness, and then vanished from them into the wilderness, to be alone with his own solitary thoughts. But Christ lived among men and women on the freest terms, and sought no fictitious sanctity by shrouding himself in mystery and solitude. He went to a marriage feast; he promoted the festivity of the occasion by making wine when there was no more left. He went to the tables of the reputable and the disreputable; feasted with Simon, and fared with Zaccheus. He formed friendships with the little family of Bethany, and often retired thither at the close of the day. He did not disdain the grateful attentions of Mary Magdalene, even at the house of a rich man. Yet, in all these situations, how easily and beautifully does he blend the life of heaven with the circumstances of earth, and show the way to act on common as well as on great occasions. He was never dazzled by the splendours of the rich, nor repelled by the miseries of the poor, but was able always to separate man from the dress of circumstances, and to serve him, by speech or deed, as a divine, sinful, immortal creature. Purity and righteousness men usually stand in awe of; and great sinners will not face a man who has the reputation of great sanctity; but Christ, who in all his purity was so pitiful and condescending, was a magnet to the wretched, and drew to himself, by an irresistible charm, all whom the world passed by or cast out. Now this was the difficulty to mingle with the throng of men and earthly passions; to affect no sanctimonious airs; to disdain no innocent joys; to be susceptible to all thoroughly human influences; and yet remain, in every circumstance, faithful to God, loyal to truth, pure in thought and speech, and firm to all the purposes of a noble life. And such, according to the Gospel narrative, was Jesus Christ. 2. It was not negative. Negative virtue is much esteemed in the world. If a man is pious, honest, truthful, temperate, self-reliant, the world will not condemn him for the want of love, magnanimity, and selfdenial. The man who passes through the world comfortably, stocked with the prudent virtues-the virtues that never bring a man into antagonism with the vested interests of unrighteousness, falsehood, and injustice that man shall have a monument to his memory, as a model of wisdom and virtue. This is the virtue of selfishness. But in the character of Christ there was not only freedom from sin, but positive holiness. There was a bright conjunction of virtues and excellences that seem only remotely connected with one another. No slanderer ever dared to breathe upon his unsullied purity; and yet his pity for the fallen was deeper and tenderer than ever beat in the bosom of the gentlest woman. His courage could dare everything in the cause of truth; could brand the rich hypocrite or sanctimonious Pharisee to his face; could dare death itself; it was the most manly, the most heroic the world ever saw; yet his fortitude and patience were as conspicuous as his courage he could bear in silence and calm what would have driven other men into indignation and madness. There was indescribable majesty in all he did, not only when he calmed the storm, or raised Lazarus from the dead, but in his simplest word or act; and the world has never seen such childlike meekness and humility. Because there was such magnanimity, joined to such meekness and lowliness of heart, he has been the refuge of the guilty and penitent, and the attraction of the broken-hearted, in every age of the world since. Justice was in the arms of love, righteousness in the embrace of selfdenial, in such wise in him that the world, as it grows, will honour him as summing up in himself all greatness and all goodness. And these various attributes were so evenly balanced, and so harmoniously blended, as to present before our eyes the model of a perfect man. His self-reliance was equal to every emergency; but who can separate it, even in thought, for a moment from that implicit dependence upon his Father, which he always openly acknowledged? So perfect is the adjustment and fulness of his whole character. 6 3. It was progressive. He grew in wisdom, and in stature, and in favour with God and man.' He grew and waxed strong in spirit.' Though he were a son, yet learned he obedience by the things that he suffered. In treating of a life so completely perfect as his, we are in constant danger of forgetting that, while it was divine, it was thoroughly, perfectly human. And, because human, it was necessarily progressive. But growth and increase do not necessarily involve transition from a state of greater to one of less deficiency-do not presuppose an inner antagonism of sin, or an overcoming of the moral and |