Chapter IV: Preparation in History for Christ (1)

EDWARD S. TALBOT.

The paradox of Divine mystery implied in the words 'The Word was made flesh,' is not exhausted by a right understanding of the Person of Christ. It extends to the relations between Christ and History. On the one hand, the Incarnation of the Son of God appears as supreme, solitary, unique, transcending all analogies of experience, all limitations of nationality or generation, determined before the world was, beyond the power of any antecedents to produce, the entry of a new thing into the world. It appears, in short, as a miracle. But, on the other hand, it appears as an historical event, occurring at a particular date, appealing to the feelings and fulfilling the hopes of the time, a climax and a new point of departure in the historical order. It does this, necessarily, because this is involved in the act of taking flesh, of entering simply, literally, naturally into the conditions of human life. Such a thing occurs, and must occur, in the natural order. To say this is not to dictate what a Divine revelation must be, but only to shew what Christianity asserts of itself. In this way it was good in God's sight that His revelation should come.

It follows from this, in the first place, that there must be two ways, both valid and necessary, of approaching in thought and study Christ manifest in the flesh. We may treat the fact of His appearing with little or no reference to historical relations, for its own inherent unchanging truth and meaning. We may also treat it as clothed in historical event, to be understood in its relations with what went before and followed after and stood around. The two methods supplement one another. It may be true that the simple personal claim which the solitary figure of Jesus Christ makes upon us, by its unalterable moral dignity and beauty, its typical humanity, its unearthly authority, is the strongest that can be made: none the less may that claim be confirmed and reinforced if we see the same figure as it were upon an historical throne; if it should become clear that what went before (and what followed after) does, in any way, pay homage to Him; if the _manner_ of His appearing in place and time be calculated to heighten the impression which the _fact_ of it makes.

And in the second place, it follows that to start in any historical treatment of the subject of this paper from the central twofold assertion as to Christ, made by S. John in the phrase 'The Word was made flesh,' is to obtain at once the right clue to the lines which it should follow.

(1) To do so is not to beg the question or to fetter the enquiry, but only to define what kind of evidence, if any, the study of Christ's relation to foregoing history can yield. We see that it must be such as works in us the conviction that He both does, and does not, occur 'naturally' at the time and place when He appeared; that history leads up to Him and prepares His way, and yet that no force of natural antecedents can account for Him or for His work. It is true that evidence for either side of this two-sided impression may have sufficient weight to determine faith especially with individual minds. The contrast between Christ and all else in history, arresting the attention and suggesting the thought of special Divine presence, may of itself be a spring of faith: or, upon the other hand, a clear discernment of His natural supremacy in history may lead a man on to higher truth. But the true evidence, as corresponding to the true and full claim, will be that which suggests the conclusion with simultaneous and equal force from either side.

(2) If the aim is not evidence but instruction, and we desire simply to understand better what is true of our Lord's relation to history, it will still advantage us greatly to start from the same point. We shall be able to recognise freely and without fear of contradiction or confusion, on the one side, the way in which the lines of history, of human experience, aspiration, achievement, character, need, lead up to Christ and issue in Him: and on the other, the unearthly and peculiar greatness of Him Who spake as never man spake, Who taught as one that had authority and not as the Scribes, Who was not convinced by any of sin: Whose daily intimacy with a disciple issued in that disciple's confession, 'Thou art the Christ, the Son of the Living God.' Such a method, starting from the Christian claim, and trying to trace out all that it involves, need not be only for the believer, any more than the quest for evidence or witness is for those only who do not believe. The Christian tests the foundations, and welcomes every corroboration, of his faith: while, in dwelling on the character of the work and of its relations to all else, the non-believer may come to find the conviction grow upon him that it was indeed 'wrought of God.'

(3) From the same point, we see at once to what double misunderstanding or double attack the Gospel not only may but must be liable. On the one side, it may be refused a hearing as miraculous; it may be understood as violating the natural order which it transcends; it may be regarded and resented as an anomaly in history. On the other side, a consideration of the aptness of its occurrence when and where it did occur, and of its harmonious relations to many lines of tendency will suggest the suspicion that it may be after all only a result, though a supreme and surprising result, of historical forces. In a word, it may be accused at once from separate, possibly from the same, quarters as too supernatural and too natural to be what it claims to be. It is all-important to notice at the outset that liability to this double attack is an inevitable incident of its true character and of that which makes its glory, viz. the presence of true Godhead under truly human conditions.

But to return to the main point.

The importance and interest of the subject of this paper may be inferred, as we have seen, directly from what the Incarnation claims to be. But we are not left to infer it for ourselves. Nothing is clearer or more striking than the place which it occupied from the outset in the declaration of the Gospel. Jesus Himself spoke of the Scribes of the kingdom as 'bringing forth out of their treasure things new and old'; and laid it down as a first principle of His kingdom that He was 'not come to destroy, but to fulfil[150].' While with surprising and commanding clearness He centres men upon Himself, and distinguishes Himself from all who came before Him, from 'the prophets and the law which prophesied until John'; He yet with evident care draws the new out of the old, and fits it on to the old: He delineates His own mission as a climax in a long appeal of God to Israel[151], and the opposition to Him and His, as a chapter of _dénouement_ in the history of an old conflict between God and the ungodly[152]. He sees a 'necessity' for the happening of things to fulfil what had been said of old[153]. The very pith of the disciples' ignorance is their failure to see how the features of His work and character had been traced beforehand, and the supreme teaching which they receive from Him is that which discloses His correspondence to the whole tenor of the Scriptures of the past[154]. The teaching of the Apostles, and of those who followed them, is faithful to these lines. Though they have to convince the world of an Event which works a revolution, which is to turn men from darkness to light: though their perfect confidence in their own truth makes them see the things that went before as elements, 'weak and beggarly elements[155],' and they have moreover battles to fight against these 'elements' set up again as antagonists: though their adherence to the Old Testament was an ever fruitful source of difficulty and attack (of which Judaizing and Gnostic controversies are the record), yet nevertheless they unswervingly maintained the inspiration of the Old Testament, and stood upon it; and we distinguish without hesitation as their normal, primary, characteristic method that of appeal to the correspondence between their Gospel and every hope and word of Israel's faith: the 'revelation of the mystery ... is ... by the scriptures of the prophets ... made known to all nations[156].' The Hebrews who wistfully look back to their temple, law, and ritual, are not taught a stern forgetfulness of what had been, nor led vaguely to spiritualize its meaning, but are led to recognise in each part of the ancient system a line which leads up to Christ. Finally, the disciple who sets the true being of his Master in monumental and awful splendour as the Word who 'was with God and was God' now made manifest in the flesh, in the same breath carries us to the very core and source of all that can be implied in preparation by declaring the same Word to have been 'in the world' before, to have been the author of all things, and the unseen light of men[157].

The relation of Christ to history, or the preparation for the Gospel, is then no afterthought of our own or any recent time. It was Augustine's saying that Christianity was as old as the world[158]: and Tertullian's (one of almost venturesome boldness) that in the previous history Christ was schooling Himself for incarnation[159]. But it is not difficult to see that our own time is one which is specially fitted to appreciate and handle this aspect of the Christian truth. Our cultivation of the historical method, our historical realism or sense of the relation of persons or events to historical setting, our recognition of the part played in forming structure, function, character, by gradual process, by heredity, by evolution, our developed understanding of the links by which the parts and successions in all nature, and not least in what is human, are bound together--all these go to form a habit of mind which in presence of such a Revelation as that of the Gospel will at once busy itself, whether for satisfaction, for edification, for controversy, or for interpretation, with the relation of the Truth to the world into which it came, to all from amongst which it sprung. In such a time it is natural that attack should try to shew that facts which historical criticism has done much to secure, and a Life which it has become impossible to treat as a myth, are simply explicable according to the natural laws of historical causation. It is natural that Christianity should be explained as the flower and bloom of Judaism, or as sprung from the fusion of Greek and Jewish influences in a Galilean medium. Such explanations may not be new, but they are urged with new resources and a more subtle ingenuity. They have the advantage of being the sort of explanations which are naturally most congenial to the time. But out of the very stress of such attacks may come a special corroboration of Christian truth. The experiment is crucial: it can hardly be expected that attack of this kind can ever command greater skill and resource than it does at present. If therefore it should be proved to fail: if we are able to look men in the face and ask whether when all allowance is made for the subtle 'chemistries' of history and for the paradoxical way in which historical results spring from what precedes them, it is possible to think that Jesus Christ and His religion were a mere growth from antecedents--then we have here the prospect of such a confirmation of faith as no age less historically scientific could, in that kind, give and receive.

But this negative result, great as its value may be, can only be part of what Christian science may yield in this sphere for the elucidation and support of faith. It should surely be able to display with greater breadth and delicacy than ever before that correspondence between the Revelation of Christ and what went before it, which was of old indicated by saying that Christ came in the 'fulness of the time.' It should be able to enhance, and not (as men fear) to impair, the evidence of a Divine presence and influence, preparing for that which was to come, moulding the plastic material of history for a 'far-off Divine event.' It may seem as if this was not so. It may seem, for example, as if the severity and activity of historical and linguistic criticism had dimmed the clearness of those correspondences between prophetic utterances spoken centuries before Christ and the points in Him or His work whereby they were fulfilled, which were once so clear. It may seem, it is evidently true, that stricter canons of interpretation forbid for us that unbounded use of the happy expedient of allegory which could make everything in the Old Testament speak of Christ. But even if this were so (and with regard to prophecies we only partially grant it), is there no countervailing gain to reckon? The hand of God may be seen in what is marvellous, startling, exceptional, unexplained. Can it not be seen as distinctly and as persuasively in what is orderly, steadfast, intelligible, and where our reason, made in God's likeness, can follow along in some degree with the how and the why of His working? It was Christ's will to give special signs, yet the curiosity which 'sought after a sign' was not honoured by Christ like that wisdom which 'discerned the signs of the times,' and so could see the force of the special signs that were given because it saw them in their true moral and spiritual context[160]. Have we any reason to hope that our time may be suffered to do (and even be doing) something for the interpretation of the witness of history to Christ which has not been done before, and which is even an advance upon what has been done? Let us consider for a moment (in order to answer this question) what it is which specially engrosses the interest and admiration of all of us in the different branches of modern study and enquiry. It is the beauty of _process_. The practical men among us watch process in its mechanical forms as contrived by invention. The naturalists and the men of science have to an extraordinary extent developed our perception of it in nature: they shew us its range, and its incredible delicacy, flexibility, and intricacy; they shew us its enormous patience in the unceasing yet age-long movements which by microscopic or less than microscopic changes accumulate the coal, or lessen the mountain; they shew us the wonderful power of adaptation by which it accommodates itself to surroundings, and appropriates and transforms them to its need. The embryologist developes its wonders as it makes 'the bones to grow in the womb of her that is with child.' And the historians in their sphere do the like: it is for them, if not the beginning and end of their work, at least the most powerful of their methods, to shew the processes by which institutions, customs, opinions, rise and decline; to arrange the facts so as to display on their chart the steps of growth, the stages of decay; to shew influences blending to form events, and parting again to destroy or re-shape them.

There is beauty in all this, more than we can, perhaps, altogether analyse or explain. As living beings we sympathise with the life and movement of it all (or, as in the case of intricate machinery, with the imitation of life) compared with what stands stark, solid, unchanging; as intelligent beings we revel and delight in its intricacy, and, further, we are gratified by the way in which it subdues with explanation what would be anomalous, abrupt, motiveless, in the way of change or event. It gives us something like the pleasure which we take in the beauty of the exquisite subtle curves and shaded surfaces of a Raphael figure compared with the rough outline of a Dürer woodcut. But we could not long rest in the admiration of mere process, whether delicate or colossal. There is a rational element present in, or controlling, our sense of beauty, which asks whence and whither, which demands unity in detail; and this finds altogether new and delightful gratification when it can see a relation, a meaning, a grouping, a symmetry, of which processes are the ministers and instruments.

It is, then, this idea of beauty in process that we bring with us as we approach to behold the facts and method of God's Redemptive Work. It is altogether too strong in us to be left behind as we cross the threshold of this region; it is too much connected with all our thinking and experience. It is very possible that there may be exaggeration about it in us: and it is indispensable for us to recognise this, 'le défaut de notre qualité.' But all the same we cannot disown, though we must control, what is so specially our own. And if our love of process is prepared to be critical, it is also prepared to be gratified: and there is opened a prospect of fresh witness to the truth of the unchanging Gospel, if it should be found that its introduction into this world is ushered in by all the beauty of process, with all the grandeur of slow unhasting preparation, the surprises of gradual transformation, the delicacies of combination, which process allows.

Such a sight is much more than wonderful, and has in it, if our ideas of what is Divine are not very narrow, much more evidence of God's hand than any mere wonder can have. But it is as wonderful as anything can be. And if we still plead that our sense of wonder stipulates for exceptionalness, it has its own way of satisfying this--the way of uniqueness. For those features which we admire in process are capable, if combined with a certain degree of grandeur, completeness, and particularity, of conveying to us the impression of a unique thing. We may dismiss as a dialectical refinement the objection which has been made that, as is doubtless true, 'everything is unique.' None the less, there is a meaning in our ordinary language when it applies the epithet 'unique' to certain persons, classes, or things. A man of science may properly speak of a certain uniqueness in the way in which natural conditions are combined so as to make life possible: a historian will certainly miss truth if he does not recognise a special uniqueness in certain historical epoch-making moments. In proportion as we believe in Mind ordering the things of nature and history, such uniqueness will have speaking significance. And as uniqueness has its degrees, and rises according to the scale, quantity, character and completeness, of that which goes to make it up, so its significance will rise proportionately, until at last, arriving at uniqueness, which seems to us absolute, we gain evidence that there is before us a Supreme Thing, a true centre to the world. The evidence is not indeed demonstrative, but it is in a high degree corroborative, and it is the highest which history can offer. It is this evidence of uniqueness which, as it seems to me, we of the present day may with special fitness seek, and shall with special welcome find:

(1) in the shaping of world-history towards the Christian era,

(2) in the special preparation of the Jewish nation.

Within the compass of a paper like the present, it is impossible to do more than indicate the lines which, even without any high degree of special education, a Christian's thought may travel in tracing the Divine work of preparation and witness.

I. In the first part of our enquiry the distinction between an outward and an inward working suggests itself as convenient, though necessarily imperfect: the one consisting in a moulding of the material facts of history, such as the geographical distribution of peoples, and the political and social order; the other in a like use of the changes in thought, feeling, and the like.

(1) It can never be altogether too hackneyed to dwell on the strange value to the world's history of the two peninsulas which we know as Greece and Italy, thrust out into that Mediterranean Sea, which was itself so remarkable as a centre and 'medium' of the western world, binding its many nations together. They share with other lands of the temperate zone all its possibilities of hardy and vigorous life: but, besides this, their sky and sea, their conveniences and difficulties, had a special stimulus to give to their early inhabitants. They were extraordinarily well suited to be the seed-plots of civilization. And these seed-plots were aptly fertilized, first by the Phoenicians, those carrier-birds of antiquity dropping seed along the Mediterranean coasts: and then by the happy contact between Greece and the other Greece opposite, to which the island bridges of the Aegean linked it, where, on the narrow strip of coast plain and rich river valley between the sea and the high plateaus of Asia Minor, the Ionians enjoyed, as Herodotus says[161], the fairest climate in the world. Upon this debouched, with the rivers from the interior, the highways along which travelled westward the civilization or the power of the dimly known but highly important early Phrygian monarchy, or from yet farther east, of the mighty Assyria. The recent discoveries of Prof. Ramsay and others re-interpret and emphasize to us this early connection between the Asian lands and Greece in Europe, of which the Lion Gate of Mycenae is a monument. What Greece thus took with her left hand she could pass across with her right to yet another Greece, 'Great Greece,' in Sicily and Southern Italy. But we may easily fail to recognise how much all this delicate and tender growth depended on favourable circumstance, and we cannot too carefully mark how space was made awhile for it to spring. The 'hills stood about' both peninsulas on the North to shelter them from intrusion: but this barrier, sufficient for ordinary times, would hardly have resisted the heavy thrust of the later pressure of population from the East and North-East, which, when it did begin, so nearly crushed Rome, and which, if it had come earlier, might have easily stifled Greek and Roman civilization in the cradle. The reader of the Persian Wars will watch almost with awe within how little Greece came of what appeared alike to Asiatic and Greek a certain subjection to the Persian. A difference of twenty years earlier, the chance of a different temper in the little Athenian people, the use by Darius of the methods of Xerxes, would, humanly speaking, have decided the other way the fate of western civilization. It is easier again to admire than to explain the happy fortune which brought the mountain kingdom of Macedon to its moment of aggression just too late to hurt the flowering and fruitage of Greece, just in time to carry its seed broadcast over Eastern, Syrian, and Egyptian lands. From all the sequence of the Graeco-Roman history which follows, and in which nothing is more important to all the purposes of Providence than the simple fact of the order of these two, Greek first, Roman second, we can here select only one feature of capital importance, viz. the transformation of a world intensely localized and sub-divided into one as singularly united and homogeneous. Follow S. Paul and see his circuits, watch him claiming the safeguard of the same Roman citizenship in the Macedonian town and in the capital of Palestine, laying hold at Caesarea on the horns of a central tribunal of justice at Rome, borne thither by the sails of the carrying trade in the 'ship of Alexandria,' meditating a journey into Spain, numbering among his Roman converts, as seems probable, one who had a direct connection with Roman Britain, writing in the same Greek to Rome and to the highlanders of Galatia, never crossed in his journeys by any track of war, never stopped by any challenge of frontier or custom-house: these are so many object-lessons to shew what the 'Pax Romana' and the Roman unity of power and organization imported for the growth of a world-religion. This was the time when it could be complained that it was impossible to flee from the Caesar's wrath because the Caesar owned the world. And to make the impression more distinct, let the eye travel backward a little, or forward a little: backward into the second or even the first century B.C., when this same Mediterranean world was still in greater part an unconsolidated chaos of political débris; when the tumult of the Macedonian and Syrian wars of Rome and then of her desolating civil strife filled the world with noise and occupied its thought and destroyed its peace; when the sea was impassable because of pirates, and when the West was still in great part unsubdued and formidable barbarism: or forward, across the space during which the Gospel had spread its influence and struck its roots and won its power, to the time so soon following, when the lands that had known no war were again traversed by the armies of rival emperors, and the barbarians began to dismember the West, and the gloom of a great fear preoccupied men's hearts. To say nothing of the middle ages, what unity of the Mediterranean world and the lands affiliated to it has the whole of later history got to shew, that can compare for a moment with the unity of the early Empire, focussed in its cosmopolitan capital Rome?

And in this there is much more than a mechanical provision for the progress of a world-religion. It is not merely that its heralds find a complete facility of communication, peaceful conditions, and a 'lingua franca' ready for their use. We must realize how the unity had been obtained. It had been by pulverizing separate nationalities, separate patriotisms, separate religions; by destroying or leaving only in a municipal form the centres round which human energy and loyalty had been wont to gather. Thus the world had been turned into that 'cold and icy plain' of which M. Renan speaks. And it is not too much to say that this process had destroyed just so many barriers to the entrance of Christianity. We have only to realize what had been previously the universal character of the worships of the western world, viz. that they had been local, the common and exclusive possession of the citizens of one place or state, and inextricably bound up with the being and welfare of that particular community. Such religions, and people bred under them, would have met Christianity, not so much with criticism of its doctrines, or with rival doctrines of their own, as with ideas and a frame of mind so alien to a spiritual and universal religion like the Gospel that it would have found no foothold in attacking them. Conceive the force with which what even in the second century after Christ the heathen objector urged, 'it is not creditable to alter the customs handed down to us from our fathers[162],' would have come from the Roman of the earlier Republic, or the Greek of the times of freedom. Nay, we may without rashness hazard the conjecture that had it been possible for the Gospel to overcome these conditions it would have done so prematurely and with loss: that they were in their time and place ministers of good: that they were bound up with that vigorous energy of development within one small limited horizon, by which, as we shall see, the preparation of the heathen world was carried out.

It was the negative aid of the Empire to Christianity that it destroyed these. But it lent more positive help. It created a demand, or at least a need, for a universal religion. Of this there are several proofs. The religious phenomena of the time other than Christianity supply the first. There is an attempt, or more than one attempt, to provide such a religion. There is the attempt by way of comprehension, of making all the gods live together as joint inhabitants of a common Pantheon. There is the attempt by way of construction, in the worship of the one Power about which there was no doubt, the Goddess Rome, and of the Emperor her deified representative. There is also, we may perhaps add, the attempt by way of philosophic thought. For philosophy at this time had a religious bent which increased not improbably as the circulation of Christian thought stole unknown through the veins of society: and it felt after the One Being whose Personal existence and Fatherhood it waveringly discerned, but whom yet it could not steadily distinguish from a personified order of nature. Such a religious idea, needed to complete Cicero's commonwealth of the Universe comprehending Gods and men, may be seen with increasing clearness in Seneca, Epictetus, and Aurelius. The need of a universal religion is thus directly shewn. But other proofs, as clear though less direct, are to be drawn from the other departments of human thought. For literature was already a unity, into which whatever the genius of provincials like Lucan, or Seneca, or Pliny contributed was gathered up. And it is a commonplace that the greatest constructive result of the imperial period was the creation or development of a universal code of law.

(2) In what has been last said we have almost crossed the imaginary line by which we were to divide the preparation in external fact from that which was more inward in thought and feeling. To deal with this latter may seem almost ridiculous: since to do so must involve the presumption of summarizing in a few lines the drift of the literature and thought of antiquity. Yet, in the briefest words, it may be possible to suggest a few true outlines of the shape which an account of that drift should take. It would certainly represent the mental history of the classical world in its relation to the Gospel as supplying a double preparation, positive and negative: a positive preparation by evolving ideas which the Gospel could work into its own fabric, or a frame of mind which would make for it a suitable 'nidus' and a receptive soil: a negative preparation by the breakdown of human nature's own constructive and speculative efforts, and by the room thus left for a revelation which would unite the broken and useless fragments of thought and minister to unsatisfied needs. And of these the negative seems the more predominant and the more direct. In so saying we are guided by what appears to be the teaching of the New Testament. It seems as though the main upshot of that time was, and was meant to be, the failure of the world 'by wisdom[163]' to find the truth: though when this has been recognised and acknowledged, then the world might find, as we may find, that all the while in this unattaining and abortive thought God had put impulses from His own wisdom, and prepared materials for His own coming work. It is the typical history of the 'natural man': and though what is primary and indispensable is that the natural man should learn the poverty and misery of his own state, and be ready to die to his life, yet the natural man too is the true though perverted work of God, and in his thoughts and instincts, his emotions and speculations, must be found a witness to which the revelation will appeal, and a response which it will elicit. It is impossible not to follow the track so suggested, and to see in the early stages of Greek life, the lusty youth-time of the natural man. Casting off the bright and truthful simplicity, and the happy story-telling of its childhood, it begins (we speak of the times between 600 and 450 B.C.) to try its young energies upon the problems of the world: it suggests its explanations, quick, ingenious, one-sided, changing, of how the world came to be: 'it came from water,' 'from air,' 'from fire:' 'it came from the dance of atoms:' 'nay, but these give us only the _how_, it came from something more than these, it came from mind:' 'are you sure what _it_ is? fix upon any part of it and you will find it slip through your fingers, for all is change, and change is all we know;' these are the quick _premières ébauches_ of its young speculation. But already there is a sound of alarm in the air. That challenge asking whether there was an 'it' at all; and if so, whether by parity of cavil there was any solidity in the other assumptions of thought, in 'good' and 'evil,' 'truth' and 'falsehood,' 'beauty' and 'ugliness;' or at least anything beyond such mere relative and convenient meaning as there is in 'big' or 'little,' 'thick' or 'thin,' 'wet' or 'dry'--this sobers men. Thought feels its own dangers. It must try its hand more seriously at some true constructive work: and so there follows that great period in which, steadied by the strong grip and sharp discipline of the great prophet of natural conscience and natural instinct, Socrates, it addresses itself to its great task of wringing her secret from the world. It is done and necessarily done in the sheer self-reliance of the unaided mind, yet of the mind in the fullest sense of the word; not the mere critical understanding, but the whole spiritual and rational energy of the man, not disowning its dependence on a discipline of character and a severe and painful training of its own powers. The results, so splendid and yet so inadequate, so rich in great intuitions and suggestions, so patient and successful in much of its detail, is preserved to us in the work of Plato and Aristotle. Christian thought can never be interested in disparaging that work: Christian thinkers at different times have done special honour to different aspects of it: and the position of Aristotle in the works of Dante, and of Aquinas, and in the frescoes of the Spanish chapel, is the sign of the ungrudged admiration given by what in our modern way we might regard as among the least appreciative and discriminating of Christian times. But the most ungrudging admiration cannot prevent our seeing, and history compels us to see, what it lacked. It lacked a foundation upon a Rock. It had the certainty, if certainty at all, which belongs to profound intuitions and to a wide interpretation of experience, not that which makes a definite, settled, and above all communicable conviction. All the while narrower, pettier, more captious, or more ordinary minds had been asking 'what is truth' in a very different spirit; had displayed the independence and captiousness of youth, and not its hopeful and trustful creativeness. And more and more this lower element began to prevail. When it became a question not of projecting systems which should impress and absorb the higher minds of a few generations, but of providing that which should pass on with men, the common run of men, into the advancing years, and stand the strain of the world's middle life; then it was found that the human mind unaided was more powerful to destroy than to build or to maintain. The dark horse of Plato's chariot pulled down his fellow: in the unaided human understanding the critical faculty proved stronger than the constructive: without the point of attachment in a central truth to which men's high thoughts could reach and cling, or (to change the figure) without a clearly-disclosed goal of truth towards which they could be seen to tend and converge, they could not maintain or justify themselves: 'the carnal mind' was against them and unworthy of them: as regards any real adoption of them by mankind for fruitful and trustworthy convictions, they passed away, according to that law of which the modern poet speaks:--

Eternal hopes are man's
Which when they should maintain themselves aloft
Want due consistence: like a pillar of smoke
That with majestic energy from earth
Rises but, having reached the thinner air,
Melts and dissolves, and is no longer seen[164].

We shall not be wrong in saying that the course of philosophy after Aristotle displayed increasingly the collapse of the experiment of speculative self-reliance. Scepticism was not confined to the 'Sceptics,' nor even shared only by the Epicureans: it deeply underlay the philosophy of the Stoics. But as with advancing life men baffled in their early sanguineness fall back (both for good and evil) and content themselves with the energies of practical life, so the mind of that day baffled and despairing of the speculative problem did not abandon, but transferred, its self-reliance; men threw themselves with a sort of defiance into the organization of conduct; 'imperturbableness' and 'self-sufficiency' became watchwords of their thought[165]. This is the character of Stoicism: this explains its vogue and wide indirect influence; its curious likeness to its apparently quite alien contemporary, Epicureanism, in a common cultivation of self-sufficingness; and, finally, its ready alliance with the natural tendencies of Roman character when it passed from Greece to Rome.

Here again was a great experiment, which had no mean success. We admire almost with awe its unsparing thoroughness, its austerity, its unworldliness, its courage, its endurance. In its later forms, when some power has touched it with gentleness, we yield it even a warmer and tenderer admiration. Only what we cannot do is to disguise its failure as a great spiritual experiment. We cannot forget how it left the mass of men untouched, how it concentrated strength by what it neglected of human sympathy and effort, how it revealed a disease and palsy of human nature which it could not cure: how at its heart it had no certainty of conviction to give peace and to resist the forces of decay. Humanity will never, perhaps, wind itself higher. But it was a height on which human strength is insufficient to stand. There lacked a sure word of truth: the joy and fruitfulness of an inspiration: a grace which could minister to the weakness, as well as summon the forces, of human nature. We cannot be blind to its failure unless we share it: unless, that is, we are trying to satisfy ourselves by some philosophy of life which misses its secrets, has no key to many of its problems, and at heart despairs of its solution. The experiment of moral self-reliance, then, failed in its turn.

But we spoke of a positive as well as a negative upshot to all this Gentile history: a positive contribution to the preparation for Christ. Where shall we look for this? Surely alongside of, and in the same plane with, the failures. If one chief result of the history of the ancient world was to exhibit the insufficiency of man's efforts to find truth and righteousness and life, this must be completely shewn in proportion as the efforts were noble, and therefore in proportion as they realized (though, at the moment, only for disappointment) the capacities, the possibilities, the true desires and ideals of man. If man the race, like man the individual, was finally to find salvation by dying to himself, to his own natural man, he could only do this when it had been adequately and magnificently proved both that he could not save himself, and how splendidly worth saving he was. He must do his best, that he may despair of his best. Do we not feel that this is just what was worked out by the histories of Greece and Rome? They are splendid experiments of human power. Diverse in their method, they combine in this result. In Greece the experiment is by way of spontaneity, of free lively development, conditioned only by its own instincts of taste and beauty. And Rome represents the alternative plan of seeking strength by discipline, by subordination, by distrust of novelty, by sacrifice of individuality to the corporate life, and of sentiment and opinion to the rule of law. Both realize deathless types of matured human life, of its beauty, its brilliant graces, its dignity, its honour, its strength. Perhaps, according to the one-sidedness which limits so severely the works and lives of men, it might have been impossible that these possibilities of his nature should have been _first_ realized with the same solidity and fulness in presence of those mighty truths, speaking of what was above man, which brooded over the history of the Jews and came forth into the world with the Gospel. Yet they are indispensable to the fulness of the Christian work: they are the human material: and that material must be first-rate in its kind. We owe it perhaps permanently to Greece and Rome that we recognise fully the grace of God's original workmanship in man, the validity of his instincts, his individual value, the sacredness and strength of all his natural social bonds, the wisdom and power possessed by his incorporated life. These are things which we could never have realized if all the world had been brought up in the barbarous societies of ancient Europe or under the great despotisms of Egypt and Asia. The religions of Asia may perhaps shew us by contrast the immense importance to a religion of being able to build with sound and adequate materials on the human side. That Greece and Rome did contribute specially in this way to the work of the true religion may be shewn by the way in which men have again and again turned back to these original sources for fresh impulses of liberty or vigour.

But these things had their day and passed. The age of Pericles and of Demosthenes, the great days of the Roman Republic, are only epochs in the history, long past at the era of our Lord. We look to see whether there is any positive preparation for Him and His Gospel in the whole drift of that history, and especially in tendencies which took a developed form closer to the era of Christianity[166].

General and popular impressions about the character and course of the history will put us on the track of a true answer. It is impossible to look at the history of the classical world without getting a double impression, that it is a history of failure and degeneracy, and yet that it is a history of bettering and progress. If we take the world at the Christian era, the times of political brilliancy and energy are over, and men are sinking into a uniformity of servility and stagnation: morally the ancient severity is lost, and the laws of Augustus are feebly coping with the results of a general dissoluteness as to morality and marriage: economically society is disfigured by a vast slave system, by the disappearance of honest and thriving free labour, and by great developments of luxury and pauperism: in literature, though it is the 'golden age,' the signs are not wanting, in artificiality and the excessive study of form, of imminent rapid decline into the later rhetorical culture: in philosophy speculation had run itself out into scepticism and self-destruction: and in religion a disbelief in the ancient gods and a doubt of all Divine providence is matter of open profession. And yet there is a bettering. The laws of the Empire become a model of humanity, equitableness, and simplicity. Seneca and Epictetus rise to thoughts of moral purity and sublimity and delicacy which at times seem hardly unworthy of the New Testament: and their humane and comprehensive ideas have cast off the limitations which the narrow life of Greek cities set to those of their greater predecessors.

Here then is a great clearing of the stage, and a great predisposing of thought and sentiment, for a religion which proclaimed a good tidings for all men without distinction of 'Jew or Greek, Barbarian and Scythian, bond or free'; for a religion of compassion; for a religion wholly spiritual and unpolitical. There are traces distinct and widespread of special tendencies to such a religion, and they are connected with the best side of the life of the time. The enormous diffusion of the 'collegia' or clubs, in which the members were drawn together without distinction of rank, or even of free and slave, in a partly religious bond, shews the instinct of the time feeling for a religion of brotherhood. There is a delicacy of family life as seen in Plutarch, in Pliny, in Fronto, which shews readiness for a religion such as should regenerate the simple instincts and relations of humanity. In the position and function of the philosophers (who sometimes half-remind one of mendicant friars[167], sometimes of the confessor or chaplain in families of rank, in their relation to education and to the vicissitudes of later life) there is implied a concentration of thought and interest upon character and upon the discipline of individual life, a sensibility to spiritual need, which all indicates a ground prepared for Christian influence. And, finally, whether it be from the stealing in of Eastern influences, or from a reaction against the cold scepticism of Ciceronian times, or from a half-political half-genuine sense of the necessity of religion to society, or from a sort of awed impression created by the marvellous fortune of Rome, or from the steady impact of the clear strong deep religious faith of the Jews scattered everywhere, and everywhere, as we know, to an extraordinary extent leavening society, or, as time went on, from a subtle influence of Christianity not yet accepted or even consciously known,--there was, it is notorious, a return towards religion in the mind of men. The temples were again thronged: priests became philosophers. In Neo-Platonism thought again looks upward, and the last phase of Greek philosophy was in the phrase of the dry and dispassionate Zeller[168] 'a philosophy of Revelation' which sought knowledge partly in the inner revelation of the Deity and partly in religious tradition. This movement was indeed a rival of Christianity; it came to put out some of its strength in conscious rivalry, or it tried in Gnostic heresies to rearrange Christianity on its own lines: but it was the result and witness of a disposition of men's hearts which made way for the Gospel.

It was not, then, merely true that the failures of the heathen world left it empty, hungering, distrustful of itself; nor merely that the world of that particular epoch gave extraordinary facilities of an outward kind for the diffusion of a world-religion: but also that in some of its most characteristic and deepest workings, in thoughts and dispositions which it had purchased at a great cost of ancient glories and liberties and of all that was proud and distinctive in Greek and Roman religion, there was that which would make men ready for Christianity and cause it to be to them, as it could not have been to their ancestors, intelligible, possible, and congenial.

II. Dr. Westcott has drawn, in a useful phrase, the invaluable distinction between a _tendency towards_, and a _tendency to produce_, the truth of Christianity[169].

If we have been able to trace a real shaping of the lines inward and outward of the world's order disposing it for a true religion, the impression which this makes on us must be enormously increased if (1) we can see that that religion, when it comes, is most obviously a thing which _comes_ to the Gentile world, and does not _grow out of_ it either by blending of tendencies, or by constructive individual genius: and if (2) we are able to indicate another and perfectly distinct course of shaping and preparation which at the required moment yielded the material and equipment for the religion which was to go out upon the world.

That this was so is in a sense upon the face of history. The Christian Church, it has been said, appeared at first as a Jewish sect. 'The salvation' Christ declared was 'of the Jews.' He came ('not to destroy but) to fulfil' the system amidst which He arose. Such sayings put us upon the track of a special preparation for the Gospel. Let us follow it. And (as the phrase is chosen to imply) we look here for something kindred indeed in many of its methods to that general preparation which we have hitherto traced, but yet more coherent, positive, and concentrated. For we pass in a sense at this point (to use language of the day), from the preparation of an environment suitable to the Gospel, to a preparation of the organism itself. Such language is obviously open to criticisms and misconceptions of more kinds than one. But it is sufficiently defensible historically and theologically to justify us in gaining the clearness which it gives.

I shall attempt to present the signs of this preparation by considering successively these three points.

(1) The relations between Israel and the world at the Christian era.

(2) The fitness of Israel to be the seed-plot of a world-religion, and of the world-religion given by Christ.

(3) The character of the process by which the Israel, so fitted, and so placed, had come to be.