[Footnote 929: ][ (return) ] "Second Alcibiades," § 23.
To develop this innate desire and "feeling after God" was the grand design of providence in "fixing the times" of the Greek nation, and "the boundaries of their habitation." [930] Man was brought, through a period of discipline, to feel his need of a personal relation to God. He was made to long for a realizing sense of his presence--to desire above all things a Father, a Counsellor, and a Friend--a living ear into which he might groan his anguish, or hymn his joy; and a living heart that could beat towards him in compassion, and prompt immediate succor and aid. The idea of a pure Spiritual Essence without form, and without emotion, pervading all, and transcending all, is too vague and abstract to yield us comfort, and to exert over us any persuasive power. "Our moral weakness shrinks from it in trembling awe. The heart can not feed on sublimities. We can not make a home of cold magnificence; we can not take immensity by the hand." [931] Hence the need and the desire that God shall condescendingly approach to man, and by some manifestation of himself in human form, and through the sensibilities of the human heart, commend himself to the heart of man--in other words, the need of an Incarnation. Thus did the education of our race, by the dispensation of philosophy, prepare the way for him who was consciously or unconsciously "the Desire of Nations," and the deepening earnestness and spiritual solicitude of the heathen world heralded the near approach of Him who was not only "the Hope of Israel" but "the Saviour of the world."
[Footnote 930: ][ (return) ] Acts xvii. 26, 27.
[Footnote 931: ][ (return) ] Caird.
The idea of an Incarnation was not unfamiliar to human thought, it was no new or strange idea to the heathen mind. The numberless metamorphoses of Grecian mythology, the incarnations of Brahm, the avatars of Vishnu, and the human form of Krishna had naturalized the thought. [932] So that when the people of Lystra saw the apostles Paul and Barnabas exercising supernatural powers of healing, they said, "The gods have come down to us in the likeness of men!" and they called Barnabas Jupiter, and Paul, Mercurius. The idea in its more definite form may have been, and indeed was, communicated to the world through the agency of the dispersed Jews. So that Virgil, the Roman poet, who was contemporary with Christ, seems to re-echo the prophecy of Isaiah--
[Footnote 932: ][ (return) ] Young's "Christ of History," p. 248.
The last age decreëd by the Fates is come,
And a new frame of all things does begin;
A holy progeny from heaven descends