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.