whole powers of darkness.

That they were

bidden to take up the cross, not counting their lives dear unto them, but forsaking all to follow Christ.

Upon Lucia and her nurse declaring their readiness to do this, Linus accepted them as candidates for baptism, and at parting gave them the vellum rolls containing the Gospel of St. Luke; then, solemnly blessing the assembly, the congregation dispersed, Fulvia and the household slaves again taking charge of the new converts, and the whole party safely regained their abode before the dawn could betray their holy vigils. It was in this manner the primitive Church kept her sabbaths. The simplicity, the purity of the worship of the Christians had nothing in it to captivate the senses, but it had everything to touch the heart. The gorgeous ceremonial of pagan mythology might dazzle the imagination of its votaries; it could never regenerate the soul: and what was its doubtful future when contrasted with the paradise promised to those who lived and died in the Christian faith? Lucia Claudia, in her beautiful enthusiasm, would at that moment have given her body to

be burned, or yielded her neck to the sword, rather than have given up her hope in Christ. Yes, she would have done all this; but would she have given up the idol of her soul, the beloved Adonijah? Ah, weak as a child with regard to the affections, she forgot that to some natures the fiery trial of martyrdom was easier than the call to give up the dearest object of the heart, if love of that object clashed with the profession of the Christian faith.

We know less of this portion of the first Christian century than any other, for the bitter persecution which had fallen upon the Roman Christians, and deprived them of their glorious Apostolic teachers St. Peter and St. Paul, had compelled them to conceal themselves from observation; therefore we have no exact account of the manner in which they worshipped God, for the history of the Church of Christ given in the Acts ended with the two years' sojourn of St. Paul in his own hired house. We must therefore draw on later authorities for the description of Christian ritual.

The age was still Apostolic, two of the companions of the Saviour yet survived in the persons of Symeon and John; therefore no

liturgy, unless we admit that of St. James* to be genuine, was in use, at least not in the Gentile Churches. In the early Apologies of Athenagoras, Justin Martyr, and Tertullian, and in the letter of Pliny the Younger, the reader will find the primitive order in which the Sabbath services were celebrated. Afterwards the prayers of devout Christians were collected and arranged in the liturgical order in which we now have them. The manner in which the Psalms are read in the English Church was adopted by the early one of Alexandria, from the Jewish ritual.

The primitive service, according to our earliest account, that drawn from the lips of the deaconesses by Pliny, commenced with a hymn in honour of Christ, sung alternately, which was followed by the worshippers binding themselves to observe the moral law with scrupulous exactness; after which they separ

* As the Jewish Church always had, and still has, a liturgical arrangement, the litany of St. James may have been used in the Christian Church of Jerusalem, but certainly without the additions at the end, which now disfigure it, as no invocations to saints were admitted into the worship of the primitive times. The prayer itself is very evangelical and beautiful.

ated, but met together in a general repast, partaken together, temperately and without disorder. But the Christian authors cited give a perfect view of divine worship in the second century, which consisted of singing, prayer, preaching, and the reception of the Lord's Supper, the substance being essentially the same as it is now, the arrangement alone being different. The liturgy growing as it were out of the injunction of St. Paul, "Let everything be done with decency and order."

CHAPTER XII.

"I am amazed-and can it be?—

Oh mockery of heaven!"-SUCKLING.

UNCONSCIOUS of her danger, because unconscious of the vast influence the Hebrew captive held over her mind and affections, Lucia Claudia, though aware of his hatred to Christianity, did not know that in communicating to him the fact that she was a catechumen (as those persons were called who had put themselves under a course of instruction previous to their Christian baptism) she would risk the loss of that faith which seemed then so precious to her soul.

Adonijah listened to her recital in gloomy silence; nothing but his intention of learning, through her, the secret places of meeting in which the Christians celebrated their Sabbath made him hear her story to the end. More than once he rent his clothes, and struck his