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.
(2) In what has been last said we have almost crossed the imaginary 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