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.