between the times preceding the Advent, and those which have followed
it. Since the Advent, Christianity has marched for fifteen hundred
years at the head of human civilization; and has driven, harnessed to
its chariot as the horses of a triumphal car, the chief intellectual
and material forces of the world. Its learning has been the learning of
the world, its art the art of the world, its genius the genius of the
world, its greatness, glory, grandeur, and majesty have been almost,
though not absolutely, all that in these respects the world has had to
boast of. That which is to come, I do not presume to portend: but of
the past we may speak with confidence. He who hereafter, in even the
remotest age, with the colourless impartiality of mere intelligence,
may seek to know what durable results mankind has for the last fifteen
hundred years achieved, what capital of the mind it has accumulated and
transmitted, will find his investigations perforce concentrated upon,
and almost confined to that part, that minor part, of mankind which has
been Christian.
Before the Advent, it was quite otherwise. The treasure of Divine
Revelation was then hidden in a napkin: it was given to a people who
were almost forbidden to impart it; at least of whom it was simply
required, that they should preserve it without variation. They had
no world-wide vocation committed to them; they lay ensconced in a
country which was narrow and obscure; obscure, not only with reference
to the surpassing splendour of Greece and Rome, but in comparison with
Assyria, or Persia, or Egypt. They have not supplied the Christian
ages with laws and institutions, arts and sciences, with the chief
models of greatness in genius or in character. The Providence of
God committed this work to others; and to Homer seems to have been
intrusted the first, which was perhaps, all things considered, also the
most remarkable stage of it[1017].
[1017] I must frankly own that, for one, I can never read without pain
the disparaging account of the Greek mind and its achievements which,
in the Fourth Book of the Paradise Regained, so great a man as Milton
has too boldly put into the mouth of our Blessed Lord. We there find
our sympathies divided, in an indescribable and most unhappy manner,
between the person of the All-wise, and the language and ideas, on
the whole not less just, which are given to Satan. In particular, I
lament the claim, really no better than a childish one, made on the
part of the Jews, to be considered as the fountainhead of the Greek
arts and letters, and the assumption for them of higher attainments in
political science. This is a sacrifice of truth, reason, and history to
prejudice, by which, as by all such proceedings, religion is sure to be
in the end the loser.
~_Christianity supplied a centre to history._~
Without bearing fully in mind this contrast between the providential
function of the Jews and that of other nations, we can hardly embrace
as we ought the importance of the part assigned, before the Advent of
our Lord, to nations and persons who lived beyond the immediate and
narrow pale of Divine Revelation. The relation of the old dispensation
to those who were not Jews, was essentially different from that of
Christendom to those who are not Christians. Only the fall of man
and his recovery are the universal facts with which Revelation is
concerned; all others are limited and partial. The interval between
the occurrence of the first, and the provision for the second, was
occupied by a variety of preparations in severalty for the revelation
of the kingdom of God. Until the Incarnation, the world’s history was
without a centre. When the Incarnation came, it showed itself to be the
centre of all that had preceded, as well as of all that was to follow:
and since the withdrawal of the visible Messiah, the history of man has
been grouped around His Word, and around the Church in which the effect
and virtue of His Incarnation are still by His unseen power prolonged.
The picture thus offered to our view is a very remarkable one. We see
the glories of the world, and that greatest marvel of God’s earthly
creation, the mind of man, become like little children, and yield
themselves to be led by the hand of the Good Shepherd: but it seems as
though the ancient promise of His coming, while just strong enough to
live in this wayward sphere, was not strong enough to make the conquest
of it; as if nothing but His own actual manifestation in the strength
of lowliness and of sorrow, and crowned by the extremity of contempt
and shame, was sufficient to restore for the world at large that symbol
of the universal duty of individual obedience and conformity, which is
afforded by the establishment of the authority of the spiritual King
over all the functions of our nature, and all the spheres, however
manifold and remote they may seem to be, in which they find their
exercise. Nor is this lesson the less striking because this, like other
parts of the divine dispensations, has been marred by the perversity of
man, ever striving to escape from that inward control wherein lies the
true hope and safety of his race.
But, even after the Advent, it was not at once that the Sovereign
of the new kingdom put in His claim for all the wealth that it
contained. As, in the day of His humiliation, He rode into Jerusalem,
foreshadowing his royal dominion to come, so Saint Paul was forthwith
consecrated to God as a kind of first fruits of the learning and
intellect of man. Yet for many generations after Christ, it was still
the Supreme will to lay in human weakness the foundations of divine
strength. Not the Apostles only, but the martyrs, and not the martyrs
only, but the first fathers and doctors of the Church, were men of whom
none could suspect that they drew the weapons of their warfare from the
armouries of human cultivation: nor of them could it be said, that by
virtue of their human endowments they had achieved the triumphs of the
cross; as it might perhaps have been said, had they brought to their
work the immense popular powers of St. Chrysostom, or the masculine
energy of St. Athanasius, or the varied and comprehensive genius of St.
Augustine.
Nor, again, if we are right in the belief that we are not to look
for the early development of humanity in the pages of Jewish and
patriarchal history, but rather to believe that it was given to
another people, and the office of recording it to the father, not only
of poetry, but of letters, does it seem difficult to read in this
arrangement the purpose of the Most High, and herewith the wisdom of
that purpose. Had the Scriptures been preserved, had the Messiah been
Incarnate, among a people who were in political sagacity, in martial
energy, in soaring and diving intellect, in vivid imagination, in the
graces of art and civilized life, the flower of their time, then the
divine origin of Christianity would have stood far less clear and
disembarrassed than it now does. The eagle that mounted upon high,
bearing on his wings the Everlasting Gospel, would have made his first
spring from a great eminence, erected by the wit and skill of man;
and the elevation of that eminence, measured upward from the plain
of common humanity, would have been so much to be deducted from the
triumph of the Redeemer.
~_Purpose served by the design._~
Thus the destructive theories of those, who teach us to regard
Christianity as no more than a new stage, added to stages that had
been previously achieved in the march of human advancement, would have
been clothed in a plausibility which they must now for ever want. ‘God
hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and
God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things
which are mighty; and base things of the world, and things which are
despised, hath God chosen, yea, and things which are not, to bring to
nought things that are[1018].’ An unhonoured undistinguished race,
simply elected to be the receivers of the Divine Word, and having
remained its always stiffnecked and almost reluctant guardians, may
best have suited the aim of Almighty Wisdom; because the medium,
through which the most precious gifts were conveyed, was pale and
colourless, instead of being one flushed with the splendours of Empire,
Intellect, and Fame.
[1018] 1 Cor. i. 27, 8.
Transcriber's Note
Page headers in the printed book have been converted to headings, and
are marked with ~swung dashes~.
The following apparent errors have been corrected:
p. xiv "sovereignity" changed to "sovereignty"
p. 42 (note) "vii-x." changed to "vii.-x."
p. 79 "unequivocially" changed to "unequivocally"
p. 118 "insolence:" changed to "insolence:’"
p. 165 "ὤλετό" changed to "ὤλετο"
p. 173 "attention," changed to "attention."
p. 192 "exemplfied" changed to "exemplified"
p. 277 "order" changed to "order."
p. 285 "Hom Theol." changed to "Hom. Theol."
p. 288 "Ganymed" changed to "Ganymede"
p. 291 "ἀῖσα" changed to "αἶσα"
p. 299 "peoples," changed to "peoples"
p. 320 "ῥεία" changed to "ῥεῖα"
p. 328 in "disaffection has yet been exhibited.[607]", the footnote
anchor has been added to the text.
p. 336 "ῥεία" changed to "ῥεῖα"
p. 352 "subject so" changed to "subject to"
p. 354 "2." changed to "(2.)"
p. 356 "δὲ" changed to "δέ"
p. 364 "it sessential" changed to "its essential"
p. 365 in "νόον ἔτραπεν[711].", the footnote anchor has been added to
the text.
p. 377 "purity, of" changed to "of purity,"
p. 383 (note) "264" changed to "264."
p. 403 (note) "Romische" changed to "Römische"
p. 404 "elswehere" changed to "elsewhere"
p. 410 "devolopment" changed to "development"
p. 420 "ἔσθλος" changed to "ἐσθλὸς"
p. 426 "morality." changed to "morality,"
p. 436 "ἀτὴ" changed to "ἄτη"
p. 460 "Ἕρως" changed to "Ἔρως"
p. 474 "ἔγω" changed to "ἐγὼ"
p. 494 in "Ajax had a spurious brother", a footnote anchor has been
removed from the text.
p. 499 (note) "in excellently" changed to "is excellently"
p. 505 "φρέσι" changed to "φρεσὶ"
p. 517 "ἔγωγε" changed to "ἐγώγε"
The following are used inconsistently in the book:
aftertimes and after-times
battlefield and battle-field
bowstring and bow-string
cupbearer and cup-bearer
dependence and dependance
Dî and Dii
Dioscuri and Dioscouroi
Erinuës and Erinues
fountainhead and fountain-head
Histie and Hestie
i. e. and i.e.
indoor and in-door
preeminence and pre-eminence
reestablished and re-established
stepmother and step-mother
synonym and synonyme
Theomythology and Theo-mythology