our Lord to Pilate contains the essence of Christianity.  “You a king,” says Pilate in astonishment; “where is your power to enforce your authority?” And our Lord’s answer seems to me to mean substantially this:  Roman legions shall suffer defeat, rout, and extermination; and Roman power shall cease to terrify.  All its might must decay.  But “everyone that is of the truth” shall attach himself to me with a love which will brave rack and stake.  All your power cannot give a grain of new life.  I can and will infuse my own divine life, my own divine self, into men.  And this new life is invincible, immortal, all-conquering.  I have infused myself into a few fishermen, and they will infuse me into a host of other men.  Thus I will transfigure into my own character every man in the world, who is of the truth, and therefore will hear my voice.  All the power of Rome cannot prevent it, and whatever opposes it must go down before it.

Christianity is the contagion of a divine life.  Society is the medium through which it could and was to work.  Greece had prepared the language necessary for its spread.  Roman power had built its highways and levelled all obstructions.

“A little leaven leaveneth the whole lump.”  “Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit, saith the Lord of Hosts.”

But, you will object, the grandest kings have had, as a rule, the fewest loyal subjects.  The prophets and seers are stoned.  Elijah stands alone on Carmel and opposed to him are more than a thousand prophets of Baal, with court and king at their head.  Heroism does not pay, and heroes are few.  Right is always in a hopeless minority.  Let us look into this matter carefully, for the objection, even if overstated, certainly contains a large amount of truth.

Let us go back to two forms having much the same grade of organization:  both worms.  One of them sets out to become a vertebrate, building an internal skeleton.  The other forms an external skeleton and becomes a crab.  To form its skeleton the crab had only to thicken the cuticle already present in the annelid.  It had to modify the already existing parapodia and their muscles, changing them to legs.  The external skeleton gave from the start a double advantage—­protection and better locomotion.  Every grain of thickening aided the animal in the struggle for existence in both these ways.  The very fact that the skeleton was external may have rendered it more liable to variation, because it was thus exposed to continual stimuli.  And the best were rapidly sifted out by Natural Selection.  The change and development went on with comparative rapidity.  In the mollusk the change was apparently still more easy and the development still more rapid.