CHAPTER XVII

HOW THE THREADS DRAW TOGETHER

That is the point to which we have now brought the story, and that is the point at which I mean to leave it. It is a point at which most of the threads of the story come together. It might almost seem to us, looking back over it, as if it were the point to which it had been designed, by some great designer, that the story of man should work itself out.

You see what the state of the world is.

There is this great and wonderful machine of world government, the Roman power, in full operation. The power could reach to any part of the wide empire; the legions would march along those Roman roads, made, as you probably know, with a wonderful straightness, up hill and down dale, never turning aside from the direction at which they aimed unless it were for a very steep mountain. They went, as the Romans themselves went, direct to their ends, straight, with no faltering.

Posts, or stations for communication, were established along those roads, after the manner of a relay race. A messenger would come galloping along from Rome to the first post out, and there he would hand his message, his letter, to another man who would go galloping with it to the next post along the road, which led perhaps to the north of Gaul, perhaps to the east of Thrace, perhaps {220} to the west of Spain, direct to the provincial governor or the commander of the legions to whom the letter was addressed; and so on, stage by stage, till it came to its destination.

It is wonderful, is it not? Have you not wondered, when you read of St. Paul's trial, at its being said, "This man might have been set at liberty if he had not appealed to Cæsar"?

It is wonderful, surely, that all that distance away, in Palestine, a man, a Jew, just because he was a Roman citizen (probably Paul's parents had acquired the right of citizenship by buying it--as could legally be done) could appeal from the decision of his judges there and claim to be taken all the way to Rome. And this at a time when he could only go by horseback overland or by sail oversea!

You know how St. Paul did go in a ship from Alexandria. That would have been a corn ship; for Rome was getting most of her corn from Egypt at this time. And you know what adventures and calamities he had by the way. He was acquitted finally, on that charge, but he had spent two years in prison at Cæsarea, and two more in Rome. And after this acquittal, he was re-arrested, re-tried and executed--a terrible story!

But for the moment the point I want you to see is how far and how certainly Rome could reach out her arm and do justice, or what was called justice. It was a very wonderful machine.

[Sidenote: Influence of Greece]

So there was this machine, which had all the material power and was wonderful for purposes of government--for organisation, as we say. But, then, look at the world, the cities, the civilisations in which it was operating. Their thought, their art, their literature, {221} was not Roman; it was Greek. Of all the Eastern part of the world, of Greece itself and all to the east of Greece, right away to the Euphrates and south of Egypt, we may say that it had learned to think in the Greek way before it had ever heard of the Romans at all. Indeed, we may talk, if we please, of Roman art, Roman literature and so on; but if we do we have to remember all the time that there is very little in it that was original. It was nearly all copied from the Greek. The Romans had great men. They had their great orator, Cicero; but he was less great than his Greek predecessor, Demosthenes. They had Livy and Tacitus, the historians. Tacitus had a style of his own. Perhaps he is the most original writer in prose that Rome produced. But Livy compares more with Thucydides, and the comparison is hardly to the advantage of the Roman historian. Besides, we may ask, "How would Livy have written if he had not had Thucydides and other Greeks to be his guides?"

We may ask, but we can have no certain answer. The answer that we are obliged to make is that it is scarcely to be believed that these Romans would have done as well, or nearly as well, as they did, if the Greeks had not set them such a good example.

Then we may look at the poets. The _Æneid_ of Virgil is certainly modelled on the _Iliad_ of Homer, and, fine though it is, it is far less admirable than the work of the far older Greek poet. Horace stands more by himself, but he uses metres which we know that he borrowed from the Greek, and it is quite possible that he stands rather alone because Greek originals on which he may have modelled his own verse have been lost.

Of writers for the theatre, there is no Roman to {222} put "in the same street," as we say, with Æschylus, Sophocles, or Aristophanes. In science and philosophy none to compare with Aristotle and Plato.

And in the arts, all the finest sculpture and architecture in Rome is known to have been copied from the Greeks. Where are the Roman names to put with those of Phidias and Praxiteles?

Everywhere, throughout the world, if a great literary work or a great artistic work was done, it was done either by a Greek or by some one of another race who had learnt from the Greeks. If Rome had conquered and possessed the world by her arms, Greece had conquered and possessed it by her thought. Already, before the Roman conquest of the world, she had achieved this conquest to the east of Italy. By means of the Roman machinery of government, and those straight roads of the Romans, Greek thought was distributed all through the Western world too.

So get that picture clear in your minds, of the Roman Empire as a means of sending out the Greek culture everywhere.

There is something else that you have to see coming in on top of the Greek thought, distributed along with that thought, through all the world. That something else is Christianity.

You have seen this--if you will remember--that in the course of our story we found that the Greeks, the Greeks at the time when the Persian conquerors from the east came up against them and could make their way no farther west, were the first people whom we met in the whole course of the story to whom religion did not mean a great deal in their lives. To the ancient Egyptians it had meant very much. To the {223} ancient Babylonians it was the same. The Persians came with the wonderful religion of Zoroaster, or Zarathustra, which influenced their lives enormously. The Greeks were the first of the peoples to whom religion meant very little. There were a few ceremonies, annually performed, and so on; but nothing that affected their character.

With the Romans it was the same. The early Roman had reverence for the "mos majorum"--the custom of their fathers. They had high ideas of justice and of such virtues as courage and of their duties as citizens. But no religion affected their lives or their thoughts.

[Sidenote: Influence of the Jews]

Now, you saw how the Jews from time to time were dispersed--to Egypt, to Babylonia, to various parts of Asia Minor, to the islands and to the Greek cities. The Greeks, not caring deeply for religious things, although greatly interested in philosophy and speculations about the mysteries of life, allowed the Jews to follow their own religion and customs wherever they settled. And the Jews adhered to their own religion and customs very strictly and tenaciously. They did not lose them in the countries in which they were dispersed. But they did not bring the people among whom they settled to their own way of thinking. They did not try to do so. Their idea of their religion was that it was for them only, for the Jews, for "the seed of Abraham"--that is, the descendants of Abraham.

When Christianity came, founded on the Jewish religion, this was all altered. Yet it was not altered just at first. You will remember that it was said that the Gospel, the good message, of Christianity was "for the Jew first, and also for the Gentile." By "Gentile" was meant any man or woman who was not a Jew. {224} But you will also remember that this idea, the idea that Christianity--the religion which branched out from the old Jewish religion--could be for any others than the Jews came as quite a new idea--almost as a shock, as we might say. You will remember perhaps how St. Peter dreamed that dream about the meats that were "common or unclean," as he considered them. In his dream he declined to eat those meats. Then he was rebuked for calling these things, which had been divinely created, common and unclean.

When he awoke, he accepted that dream as a warning to him that he was not to look on the Gentile as a man so "common and defiled" in comparison with the Jew as not to be able to receive the message of Christianity.

[Sidenote: Message to the Gentiles]

But in order to spread Christianity from its source and around Jerusalem, it was not necessary in the first instance to go actually to the Gentiles. You have seen how the Jews were dispersed throughout the cities of the world. The gospel could be carried to these first, to these Jews of the various dispersals which had taken place in course of their terribly troubled story. They were everywhere, all over the known world; and to these the Christian message could, and did, go; and many of them received it and became Christians. From them, no doubt, as well as from St. Paul, "the apostle to the Gentiles," and other special messengers and missionaries, Christianity spread to those among whom these dispersed and exiled Jews were living, but it was only gradually that the idea grew that it was a world religion, and not for the Jews only.

To one other point I would draw your attention. Most of Christ's followers were very humble men, of {225} little or no education. They heard the words and carried His message among their own people. But the cities of the world, as we have seen, were inhabited by men whose minds were filled with Greek thought, Greek philosophy. They had no religion that made a real difference in their lives, although they speculated eagerly about "the unknown god," and paid reverence to such deities as "Diana of the Ephesians"; but they were highly educated.

If these fishermen of the Sea of Galilee, who were Christ's first disciples, these humble men of whom I wrote just now, had gone about from city to city and spoken of Christ and of Christianity in the very simple language in which they must have spoken of these things, what effect could they have had on the people whose minds were full of philosophical speculations? Very little. To accept the gospel of Christ "like a little child" would have been quite impossible for these men whose minds were formed by the Greek thought.

But after those first humble fishermen and the like came others, men of learning: St. Luke, who was a doctor, a medical man, a scientific man; St. John and St. Paul. All these, and many more, no doubt, who became fervent Christians, had been educated in the Greek philosophy. The writings of St. John and of St. Paul show beyond possibility of mistake that this philosophy was familiar to them and that their minds and thoughts worked in the ways that it had taught them.

Directly they began to feel the reality of Christ's message, and that He really was a divine Person, then they, naturally, were able to see in His message and teaching a great deal that the fishermen had not understood. They saw that it was a message which could be {226} interpreted in such a way as to fit in with all that philosophical speculation with which the minds of all educated men in the world were full. It not only fitted in with that speculation, but it seemed to come as the crown and the completion of it all. It gave it just what it had been very badly wanting. It brought God into a world that had been seeking, seeking very hard, to find God, but a world, as we have seen, that, in spite of all the seeking, was practically Godless.

[Sidenote: The designed end]

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 {227} 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.

{229}

INDEX

ABRAHAM, in Chaldæa, 55

Actium, battle of, 210

Æneas, 164

Agricultural Age, the, 4

Alexander, the Great, 155 _et seq._ death of, 158 his generals, 160

Animals, in Egypt, 14 _et seq._

Antony, 209 _et seq._ and Cleopatra, 210

Art, in Babylonia, 65

Assyria, rise of, 54, 67-68 fall of, 103

Astronomy, in Babylon, 59

BABYLONIA, 49 _et seq._ and Egypt, 25

Bast, the Cat-goddess, 34

Book of the Dead, the, 40

Bronze Age, the, 6

CÆSAR, JULIUS, 198 assassination of, 206 commands in Gaul, 199 crosses Rubicon, 200 defeats Pompey, 200 Dictator for life, 202 in Britain, 199 subdues Parthians, 201

Camels, in Egypt, 13

Carchemish, battles at, 104-5

Carthage, destruction of, 176

Carthaginians, 147 _et seq._ defeated by Gelo, 149

Cinna, 197

Cleopatra restored by Cæsar to throne, 201 and Antony, 210

Comitia, 179 _et seq._

Corn, in Egypt, 16

Costume, in Babylonia, 66 in Egypt, 38 _et seq._

Creation of World, Babylonian account of, 60

Crete, 76 _et seq._

Crœsus, king of Lydia, 117

Cuneiform writing, 69 _et seq._

Cyrus, the Persian, 111 _et seq._ sends back exiled Jews, 113

DELTA, the, 3

EGYPT, 11 _et seq._ hunting in, 15 Upper and Lower, 21

Egyptian religions, 27 _et seq._

Etruscans, the, 166

Euphrates, the, 2

Evans, Sir Arthur, 76

FAMOUS Romans, compared with Famous Greeks, 221

First Dynasty of Egyptian Kings, 21

Flood, the. Babylonian account of, 61

GELO, defeats Carthaginians, 149

Goats, in Egypt, 13

Gracchus, Tiberius and Caius, 194

Granicus, river, battle on, 157

Greece great men of, 139

Greek learning, philosophy, art, etc., 121 _et seq._ states, jealousy between, 145 _et passim_ states, downfall of Sparta, 145 warrior, 118

HANNIBAL, 173-4

Herodotus, 34, 146

Hieroglyphic, 36

Historians, Thucydides and Herodotus compared, 146

Horses, in battle, 89

Horus, Egyptian god, 31

Hunting Age, the, 4

Hyksos, the "Shepherd" Kings of Egypt, 23

IONIANS, the, 128

Ipsus, battle of, 160

Iron Age, the, 6

Isis, Egyptian goddess, 31

Israel, divided from Judah, 101

Issus, battle of, 157

JEHOVAH,89

Jerusalem, taken by Nebuchadnezzar, 106 destruction of, by the Romans, 218

Jewish religion, basis of Christian religion, 107 its character, 108 _et seq._

Jews, the, in Alexandria, 161 Canaan,95 Egypt, 73-74

Jews, Greek influence among, 204 Pharisees and Sadducees, 204 revolt against Rome, 205 Herod, the great, king of, 206, 217 under Roman procurators, 215

KHAMMURABI, Code of, 62 _et seq._

Knossos, 77 _et seq._

LABYRINTH, at Crete, 81

Legions, the, 181 _et seq._ in Asia Minor, 185 power passing to, 195

Levant, the, 2

MARATHON, battle of, 131-2

Marduk, or Merodach, 58

Marius, 194, 197

Megiddo, battles at, 104

Memphis, 23

Mesopotamia, 3

Minoans, their sea-power, 82-83

Minos, king of Crete, 78

Minotaur, the, 81

Mithridates, king of Pontus, 193, 196

Moses, 74

Mummies, 44

Mycenæ, Cretan buildings at, 79

NEBUCHADNEZZAR, king of Babylon, 105

Nile, the river, 3, 5, 11 _et seq._

OAKS, old, in England, 8

Octavius, 209 _et seq._

Octavius, Master of the World, 211 called Cæsar Augustus, 213

Osiris, Egyptian god, 31

Ostriches, carved, 11

PALESTINE, between the two Empires, 25

Papyrus, 17

Parthians, the, subdued by Julius Cæsar, 201

Pastoral Age, the, 4

"Pax Romana," 192

Peloponnesian War, 145, 150

Peoples of the Sea, 120

Persian Gulf, 2

Persians, the, 110 _et seq._ their battle methods, 116

Phalanx, the Greek, 117 the Macedonian, 153

Philip, king of Macedon, 153 _et seq._

Philistines, the, 95-100

Philosophers, Stoic and Epicurean, 143

Phœnicians, 96

Platæa, battle of, 137

Pompey, the Great, 197 _et seq._

Pontius Pilate, 213 at trial of Christ, 216

Postal Service, in Roman Empire, 220

Pottery, 18

Priests, their power in Egypt, 36, 38, 47

Ptolemy, 159

Punic Wars, the, 172 _et seq._

Pyramids, the, 42

Pyrrhus, king of Epirus, 167 _et seq._

RE, the sun-god, 33

Rome, 164 _et seq._ constitution of, 178 _et seq._

Rome, conquers Macedon, 187 Egypt, 188 Mistress of the World, 190 _et seq._ slaves in, 194, 198

SACRED animals, 30

Salamis, battle of, 136

Scarabs, 34

Seleucus, 159

Semites, 55 _et seq._

Senate, of Rome, 178 _et seq._

Sennacherib, in his chariot, 102

Seth, Egyptian god, 31

Shanash, Babylonian sun-god, 57

Sicily, Greeks in, 148 its importance to Rome, 172

Silsilla, 11

Solomon, his kingdom, 100

Sothis, the star of Seth, the Dog-star, 12

Souls, Egyptian idea of, 45

Spartans, soldiers in Asia Minor, 111 virtues of, 138

Stone Age, the, 6

Sulla, 196-7

Sumerians, 54

Syracuse, siege of, by Athenians, 150 Dionysius, tyrant and saviour of, 151

TETHMOSIS III., 23

Themistocles, salvation of Greece due to, 136

Thermopylæ, battle of, 135

Three great facts that worked together, 226-7

Tigris, river, 2

"Totem," worship of, 30

Triumvirate, the first, 199 the second, 208

Troy, the siege of, etc., 124 Homer's account of the siege of, 124 more probable story of the siege of, 125 _et seq._

WAR, methods and engines of, 90 _et seq._

Water-raising machine, 51

XERXES, king of Persia, his attempt on Greece, 133 his alliance with Carthage, 134

ZOROASTER, or Zarathustra, 114

THE END