But, even after the Advent, it was not at once that the Sovereign of the new kingdom put in His claim for all the wealth that it contained. As, in the day of His humiliation, He rode into Jerusalem, foreshadowing his royal dominion to come, so Saint Paul was forthwith consecrated to God as a kind of first fruits of the learning and intellect of man. Yet for many generations after Christ, it was still the Supreme will to lay in human weakness the foundations of divine strength. Not the Apostles only, but the martyrs, and not the martyrs only, but the first fathers and doctors of the Church, were men of whom none could suspect that they drew the weapons of their warfare from the armouries of human cultivation: nor of them could it be said, that by virtue of their human endowments they had achieved the triumphs of the cross; as it might perhaps have been said, had they brought to their work the immense popular powers of St. Chrysostom, or the masculine energy of St. Athanasius, or the varied and comprehensive genius of St. Augustine.
Nor, again, if we are right in the belief that we are not to look for the early development of humanity in the pages of Jewish and patriarchal history, but rather to believe that it was given to another people, and the office of recording it to the father, not only of poetry, but of letters, does it seem difficult to read in this arrangement the purpose of the Most High, and herewith the wisdom of that purpose. Had the Scriptures been preserved, had the Messiah been Incarnate, among a people who were in political sagacity, in martial energy, in soaring and diving intellect, in vivid imagination, in the graces of art and civilized life, the flower of their time, then the divine origin of Christianity would have stood far less clear and disembarrassed than it now does. The eagle that mounted upon high, bearing on his wings the Everlasting Gospel, would have made his first spring from a great eminence, erected by the wit and skill of man; and the elevation of that eminence, measured upward from the plain of common humanity, would have been so much to be deducted from the triumph of the Redeemer.
Purpose served by the design.
Thus the destructive theories of those, who teach us to regard Christianity as no more than a new stage, added to stages that had been previously achieved in the march of human advancement, would have been clothed in a plausibility which they must now for ever want. ‘God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty; and base things of the world, and things which are despised, hath God chosen, yea, and things which are not, to bring to nought things that are[1018].’ An unhonoured undistinguished race, simply elected to be the receivers of the Divine Word, and having remained its always stiffnecked and almost reluctant guardians, may best have suited the aim of Almighty Wisdom; because the medium, through which the most precious gifts were conveyed, was pale and colourless, instead of being one flushed with the splendours of Empire, Intellect, and Fame.
FOOTNOTES
[1] Döllinger Heid. u. Jud. v. 1. p. 254.
[2] See Heyne ad Il. i. 603; Terpstra, Antiquitas Homerica, i. 3. And so late as the Cambridge Essays 1856. p. 149.
[3] See ‘Homerus, pt. i.’ by Archdeacon Williams: ‘Primitive Tradition,’ 1843, by the same; Edinb. Rev. No. 155, art. Homerus, and the reference, p. 50, to Cesarotti’s Ragionamento Storico-Critico.
[4] Horsley’s Dissertation on the Prophecies of the Messiah dispersed among the heathen. See also Mr. Harvey’s Observations on the Gnostic System, pp. iii and seqq., prefixed to his S. Irenæus, Cambridge, 1857. Williams’s Primitive Tradition, p. 9.