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 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.
INDEX
ABRAHAM, in Chaldæa, [55]
Actium, battle of, [210]
Æneas, [164]