HOW THE THREADS DRAW TOGETHER
That is the point to which we have now brought the story, and that is
the point at which I mean to leave it. It is a point at which most
of the threads of the story come together. It might almost seem to
us, looking back over it, as if it were the point to which it had
been designed, by some great designer, that the story of man should
work itself out.
You see what the state of the world is.
There is this great and wonderful machine of world government, the
Roman power, in full operation. The power could reach to any part of
the wide empire; the legions would march along those Roman roads,
made, as you probably know, with a wonderful straightness, up hill
and down dale, never turning aside from the direction at which they
aimed unless it were for a very steep mountain. They went, as the
Romans themselves went, direct to their ends, straight, with no
faltering.
Posts, or stations for communication, were established along those
roads, after the manner of a relay race. A messenger would come
galloping along from Rome to the first post out, and there he would
hand his message, his letter, to another man who would go galloping
with it to the next post along the road, which led perhaps to the
north of Gaul, perhaps to the east of Thrace, perhaps {220} to the
west of Spain, direct to the provincial governor or the commander of
the legions to whom the letter was addressed; and so on, stage by
stage, till it came to its destination.
It is wonderful, is it not? Have you not wondered, when you read of
St. Paul's trial, at its being said, "This man might have been set at
liberty if he had not appealed to Cæsar"?
It is wonderful, surely, that all that distance away, in Palestine, a
man, a Jew, just because he was a Roman citizen (probably Paul's
parents had acquired the right of citizenship by buying it--as could
legally be done) could appeal from the decision of his judges there
and claim to be taken all the way to Rome. And this at a time when
he could only go by horseback overland or by sail oversea!
You know how St. Paul did go in a ship from Alexandria. That would
have been a corn ship; for Rome was getting most of her corn from
Egypt at this time. And you know what adventures and calamities he
had by the way. He was acquitted finally, on that charge, but he had
spent two years in prison at Cæsarea, and two more in Rome. And
after this acquittal, he was re-arrested, re-tried and executed--a
terrible story!
But for the moment the point I want you to see is how far and how
certainly Rome could reach out her arm and do justice, or what was
called justice. It was a very wonderful machine.
[Sidenote: Influence of Greece]
So there was this machine, which had all the material power and was
wonderful for purposes of government--for organisation, as we say.
But, then, look at the world, the cities, the civilisations in which
it was operating. Their thought, their art, their literature, {221}
was not Roman; it was Greek. Of all the Eastern part of the world,
of Greece itself and all to the east of Greece, right away to the
Euphrates and south of Egypt, we may say that it had learned to think
in the Greek way before it had ever heard of the Romans at all.
Indeed, we may talk, if we please, of Roman art, Roman literature and
so on; but if we do we have to remember all the time that there is
very little in it that was original. It was nearly all copied from
the Greek. The Romans had great men. They had their great orator,
Cicero; but he was less great than his Greek predecessor,
Demosthenes. They had Livy and Tacitus, the historians. Tacitus had
a style of his own. Perhaps he is the most original writer in prose
that Rome produced. But Livy compares more with Thucydides, and the
comparison is hardly to the advantage of the Roman historian.
Besides, we may ask, "How would Livy have written if he had not had
Thucydides and other Greeks to be his guides?"
We may ask, but we can have no certain answer. The answer that we
are obliged to make is that it is scarcely to be believed that these
Romans would have done as well, or nearly as well, as they did, if
the Greeks had not set them such a good example.
Then we may look at the poets. The _Æneid_ of Virgil is certainly
modelled on the _Iliad_ of Homer, and, fine though it is, it is far
less admirable than the work of the far older Greek poet. Horace
stands more by himself, but he uses metres which we know that he
borrowed from the Greek, and it is quite possible that he stands
rather alone because Greek originals on which he may have modelled
his own verse have been lost.
Of writers for the theatre, there is no Roman to {222} put "in the
same street," as we say, with Æschylus, Sophocles, or Aristophanes.
In science and philosophy none to compare with Aristotle and Plato.
And in the arts, all the finest sculpture and architecture in Rome is
known to have been copied from the Greeks. Where are the Roman names
to put with those of Phidias and Praxiteles?
Everywhere, throughout the world, if a great literary work or a great
artistic work was done, it was done either by a Greek or by some one
of another race who had learnt from the Greeks. If Rome had
conquered and possessed the world by her arms, Greece had conquered
and possessed it by her thought. Already, before the Roman conquest
of the world, she had achieved this conquest to the east of Italy.
By means of the Roman machinery of government, and those straight
roads of the Romans, Greek thought was distributed all through the
Western world too.
So get that picture clear in your minds, of the Roman Empire as a
means of sending out the Greek culture everywhere.
There is something else that you have to see coming in on top of the
Greek thought, distributed along with that thought, through all the
world. That something else is Christianity.
You have seen this--if you will remember--that in the course of our
story we found that the Greeks, the Greeks at the time when the
Persian conquerors from the east came up against them and could make
their way no farther west, were the first people whom we met in the
whole course of the story to whom religion did not mean a great deal
in their lives. To the ancient Egyptians it had meant very much. To
the {223} ancient Babylonians it was the same. The Persians came
with the wonderful religion of Zoroaster, or Zarathustra, which
influenced their lives enormously. The Greeks were the first of the
peoples to whom religion meant very little. There were a few
ceremonies, annually performed, and so on; but nothing that affected
their character.
With the Romans it was the same. The early Roman had reverence for
the "mos majorum"--the custom of their fathers. They had high ideas
of justice and of such virtues as courage and of their duties as
citizens. But no religion affected their lives or their thoughts.
[Sidenote: Influence of the Jews]
Now, you saw how the Jews from time to time were dispersed--to Egypt,
to Babylonia, to various parts of Asia Minor, to the islands and to
the Greek cities. The Greeks, not caring deeply for religious
things, although greatly interested in philosophy and speculations
about the mysteries of life, allowed the Jews to follow their own
religion and customs wherever they settled. And the Jews adhered to
their own religion and customs very strictly and tenaciously. They
did not lose them in the countries in which they were dispersed. But
they did not bring the people among whom they settled to their own
way of thinking. They did not try to do so. Their idea of their
religion was that it was for them only, for the Jews, for "the seed
of Abraham"--that is, the descendants of Abraham.
When Christianity came, founded on the Jewish religion, this was all
altered. Yet it was not altered just at first. You will remember
that it was said that the Gospel, the good message, of Christianity
was "for the Jew first, and also for the Gentile." By "Gentile" was
meant any man or woman who was not a Jew. {224} But you will also
remember that this idea, the idea that Christianity--the religion
which branched out from the old Jewish religion--could be for any
others than the Jews came as quite a new idea--almost as a shock, as
we might say. You will remember perhaps how St. Peter dreamed that
dream about the meats that were "common or unclean," as he considered
them. In his dream he declined to eat those meats. Then he was
rebuked for calling these things, which had been divinely created,
common and unclean.
When he awoke, he accepted that dream as a warning to him that he was
not to look on the Gentile as a man so "common and defiled" in
comparison with the Jew as not to be able to receive the message of
Christianity.
[Sidenote: Message to the Gentiles]
But in order to spread Christianity from its source and around
Jerusalem, it was not necessary in the first instance to go actually
to the Gentiles. You have seen how the Jews were dispersed
throughout the cities of the world. The gospel could be carried to
these first, to these Jews of the various dispersals which had taken
place in course of their terribly troubled story. They were
everywhere, all over the known world; and to these the Christian
message could, and did, go; and many of them received it and became
Christians. From them, no doubt, as well as from St. Paul, "the
apostle to the Gentiles," and other special messengers and
missionaries, Christianity spread to those among whom these dispersed
and exiled Jews were living, but it was only gradually that the idea
grew that it was a world religion, and not for the Jews only.
To one other point I would draw your attention. Most of Christ's
followers were very humble men, of {225} little or no education.
They heard the words and carried His message among their own people.
But the cities of the world, as we have seen, were inhabited by men
whose minds were filled with Greek thought, Greek philosophy. They
had no religion that made a real difference in their lives, although
they speculated eagerly about "the unknown god," and paid reverence
to such deities as "Diana of the Ephesians"; but they were highly
educated.
If these fishermen of the Sea of Galilee, who were Christ's first
disciples, these humble men of whom I wrote just now, had gone about
from city to city and spoken of Christ and of Christianity in the
very simple language in which they must have spoken of these things,
what effect could they have had on the people whose minds were full
of philosophical speculations? Very little. To accept the gospel of
Christ "like a little child" would have been quite impossible for
these men whose minds were formed by the Greek thought.
But after those first humble fishermen and the like came others, men
of learning: St. Luke, who was a doctor, a medical man, a scientific
man; St. John and St. Paul. All these, and many more, no doubt, who
became fervent Christians, had been educated in the Greek philosophy.
The writings of St. John and of St. Paul show beyond possibility of
mistake that this philosophy was familiar to them and that their
minds and thoughts worked in the ways that it had taught them.
Directly they began to feel the reality of Christ's message, and that
He really was a divine Person, then they, naturally, were able to see
in His message and teaching a great deal that the fishermen had not
understood. They saw that it was a message which could be {226}
interpreted in such a way as to fit in with all that philosophical
speculation with which the minds of all educated men in the world
were full. It not only fitted in with that speculation, but it
seemed to come as the crown and the completion of it all. It gave it
just what it had been very badly wanting. It brought God into a
world that had been seeking, seeking very hard, to find God, but a
world, as we have seen, that, in spite of all the seeking, was
practically Godless.
[Sidenote: The designed end]
Now, that is the conclusion of this Greatest Story in the World, or,
at least, it is the point at which it seems best to me to leave it.
The threads of the story have come together now. They have come
together in this sense, that we have the great machine formed by the
Roman government ready to convey any message throughout the length
and breadth of the world (or of what was then counted as making up
the world). That is the first thing. Then we have the Greek thought
distributed all along the world roads which this machine had made,
and along which it keeps up the communications. And finally we have
the Jews, that people of such extraordinary toughness, so
marvellously determined to hold on to their own ways of life and of
serving God, thoroughly dispersed all the world over, and so carrying
their religion and their religious books, which are the base of the
Christian religion, with them everywhere.
These are the three great facts which have come together at this
point at which we are leaving this great story--the Roman
world-power, the Greek world-thought, the Christian world-religion.
That the last had to go through dreadful trials and suffer terrible
persecution before it could become world-wide (even as the world was
understood then) makes no {227} difference. The foundations had been
laid on which it was to be built.
I do not know how it may seem to you, but to me it rather looks as if
the whole story, all through the ages, even from the first page where
we began to trace it, say some five thousand years before Christ, had
been working up to just this point--as if it all had been designed to
this end.
Understand me--I do not say that it is so. None of us is able to
tell how far man has been allowed to act of his own free will in
forming his story on the earth, and in what chapters and pages of the
story his acts have been determined by a Higher Power. We know that
he is allowed much freedom. We are sure, too, that the freedom is
not unlimited. Therefore it is impossible for us to tell, of any
particular action or series of actions, whether they are all man's
own or whether they have been arranged for him. I will only say
this, that it looks to me very much as if it had been arranged that
the Roman power, the Greek thought, and the Christian religion should
come together just at this moment in our story and complete each
other for the service of man. I say that it looks to me as if it
were so. Do each of you think it out for yourself and see how it
appears to you.
{229}
INDEX
ABRAHAM, in Chaldæa, 55
Actium, battle of, 210
Æneas, 164
Agricultural Age, the, 4
Alexander, the Great, 155 _et seq._
death of, 158
his generals, 160
Animals, in Egypt, 14 _et seq._
Antony, 209 _et seq._
and Cleopatra, 210
Art, in Babylonia, 65
Assyria, rise of, 54, 67-68
fall of, 103
Astronomy, in Babylon, 59
BABYLONIA, 49 _et seq._
and Egypt, 25
Bast, the Cat-goddess, 34
Book of the Dead, the, 40
Bronze Age, the, 6
CÆSAR, JULIUS, 198
assassination of, 206
commands in Gaul, 199
crosses Rubicon, 200
defeats Pompey, 200
Dictator for life, 202
in Britain, 199
subdues Parthians, 201
Camels, in Egypt, 13
Carchemish, battles at, 104-5
Carthage, destruction of, 176
Carthaginians, 147 _et seq._
defeated by Gelo, 149
Cinna, 197
Cleopatra restored by Cæsar to throne, 201
and Antony, 210
Comitia, 179 _et seq._
Corn, in Egypt, 16
Costume, in Babylonia, 66
in Egypt, 38 _et seq._
Creation of World, Babylonian account of, 60
Crete, 76 _et seq._
Crœsus, king of Lydia, 117
Cuneiform writing, 69 _et seq._
Cyrus, the Persian, 111 _et seq._
sends back exiled Jews, 113
DELTA, the, 3
EGYPT, 11 _et seq._
hunting in, 15
Upper and Lower, 21
Egyptian religions, 27 _et seq._
Etruscans, the, 166
Euphrates, the, 2
Evans, Sir Arthur, 76
FAMOUS Romans, compared with Famous Greeks, 221
First Dynasty of Egyptian Kings, 21
Flood, the. Babylonian account of, 61
GELO, defeats Carthaginians, 149
Goats, in Egypt, 13
Gracchus, Tiberius and Caius, 194
Granicus, river, battle on, 157
Greece great men of, 139
Greek learning, philosophy, art, etc., 121 _et seq._
states, jealousy between, 145 _et passim_
states, downfall of Sparta, 145
warrior, 118
HANNIBAL, 173-4
Herodotus, 34, 146
Hieroglyphic, 36
Historians, Thucydides and Herodotus compared, 146
Horses, in battle, 89
Horus, Egyptian god, 31
Hunting Age, the, 4
Hyksos, the "Shepherd" Kings of Egypt, 23
IONIANS, the, 128
Ipsus, battle of, 160
Iron Age, the, 6
Isis, Egyptian goddess, 31
Israel, divided from Judah, 101
Issus, battle of, 157
JEHOVAH,89
Jerusalem, taken by Nebuchadnezzar, 106
destruction of, by the Romans, 218
Jewish religion, basis of Christian religion, 107
its character, 108 _et seq._
Jews, the, in Alexandria, 161
Canaan,95
Egypt, 73-74
Jews, Greek influence among, 204
Pharisees and Sadducees, 204
revolt against Rome, 205
Herod, the great, king of, 206, 217
under Roman procurators, 215
KHAMMURABI, Code of, 62 _et seq._
Knossos, 77 _et seq._
LABYRINTH, at Crete, 81
Legions, the, 181 _et seq._
in Asia Minor, 185
power passing to, 195
Levant, the, 2
MARATHON, battle of, 131-2
Marduk, or Merodach, 58
Marius, 194, 197
Megiddo, battles at, 104
Memphis, 23
Mesopotamia, 3
Minoans, their sea-power, 82-83
Minos, king of Crete, 78
Minotaur, the, 81
Mithridates, king of Pontus, 193, 196
Moses, 74
Mummies, 44
Mycenæ, Cretan buildings at, 79
NEBUCHADNEZZAR, king of Babylon, 105
Nile, the river, 3, 5, 11 _et seq._
OAKS, old, in England, 8
Octavius, 209 _et seq._
Octavius, Master of the World, 211
called Cæsar Augustus, 213
Osiris, Egyptian god, 31
Ostriches, carved, 11
PALESTINE, between the two Empires, 25
Papyrus, 17
Parthians, the, subdued by Julius Cæsar, 201
Pastoral Age, the, 4
"Pax Romana," 192
Peloponnesian War, 145, 150
Peoples of the Sea, 120
Persian Gulf, 2
Persians, the, 110 _et seq._
their battle methods, 116
Phalanx, the Greek, 117
the Macedonian, 153
Philip, king of Macedon, 153 _et seq._
Philistines, the, 95-100
Philosophers, Stoic and Epicurean, 143
Phœnicians, 96
Platæa, battle of, 137
Pompey, the Great, 197 _et seq._
Pontius Pilate, 213
at trial of Christ, 216
Postal Service, in Roman Empire, 220
Pottery, 18
Priests, their power in Egypt, 36, 38, 47
Ptolemy, 159
Punic Wars, the, 172 _et seq._
Pyramids, the, 42
Pyrrhus, king of Epirus, 167 _et seq._
RE, the sun-god, 33
Rome, 164 _et seq._
constitution of, 178 _et seq._
Rome, conquers Macedon, 187
Egypt, 188
Mistress of the World, 190 _et seq._
slaves in, 194, 198
SACRED animals, 30
Salamis, battle of, 136
Scarabs, 34
Seleucus, 159
Semites, 55 _et seq._
Senate, of Rome, 178 _et seq._
Sennacherib, in his chariot, 102
Seth, Egyptian god, 31
Shanash, Babylonian sun-god, 57
Sicily, Greeks in, 148
its importance to Rome, 172
Silsilla, 11
Solomon, his kingdom, 100
Sothis, the star of Seth, the Dog-star, 12
Souls, Egyptian idea of, 45
Spartans, soldiers in Asia Minor, 111
virtues of, 138
Stone Age, the, 6
Sulla, 196-7
Sumerians, 54
Syracuse, siege of, by Athenians, 150
Dionysius, tyrant and saviour of, 151
TETHMOSIS III., 23
Themistocles, salvation of Greece due to, 136
Thermopylæ, battle of, 135
Three great facts that worked together, 226-7
Tigris, river, 2
"Totem," worship of, 30
Triumvirate, the first, 199
the second, 208
Troy, the siege of, etc., 124
Homer's account of the siege of, 124
more probable story of the siege of, 125 _et seq._
WAR, methods and engines of, 90 _et seq._
Water-raising machine, 51
XERXES, king of Persia, his attempt on Greece, 133
his alliance with Carthage, 134
ZOROASTER, or Zarathustra, 114
THE END