Now, our Lord's arrival on the scene of human history corresponds with the general law so far as this, that He came when a course of preparation, conducted through previous ages, was complete. But He was not the product of His own or of any preceding age. What is true of great men who are only great men is not true of Him. They receive from their age as much as they give it; they embody and reflect its spirit; they seize upon the ideas which are in circulation, and, whether by speech or action, express them more vividly than do others ; their genera- tion does a great deal for them ; it is pleased with them because it sees itself reflected in them ; and their power with it is often in an inverse ratio to their real originality. With our Lord it was otherwise. He owed nothing to the time or to the country which witnessed His Advent; He had no contact with the world of Greek thought, or of Eoman politics and administration. He borrowed Eabbinical language enough to make Himself in- telligible ; but no Eabbi could have said, or could have omitted to say, what He did. The preceding ages only prepared His way before Him, by forming the circumstances, the con- victions, the moral experience of His countrymen and others; and thus a preceding period, marked in the counsels of God, had to be run out. At last its final hour had struck, and that hour was " the fulness of the time " ; it was the moment of the Advent.
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2. The historical preparation. — There can be no doubt what St. Paul had in his mind when he wrote of " the fulness of the time." He was a Jew, and the story of his race, with all its vicissitudes, was ever present to him. He was a Eoman, and all around were the evidences of the political supremacy of his nation. He was an educated man — a moralist, a logician, a philosopher — and could measure the intellectual strivings which had marked the closing years of the pre-Christian era.
Palestine, where the Saviour of Mankind was born, lay at the very centre of the then known world, and it has been picturesquely put that "the City of God is built at the confluence of three civilizations." Each of these civilizations — Jewish, Greek, Eoman — helped to complete what the Apostle called " the fulness of the time." The Jews' contribution was religious. Idolatry among them had, it is true, died out, but legalism and ceremonialism were in the ascendant, and, as always happens when we offer men's souls husks, there was a demand among some of them for rich spiritual food. Devout minds were weary of the hair-splitting of the Eabbinical schools, of the mere mechanism of*^iety, of the " aimless circle of complicated rules," and there were pious hearts that longed for purity and peace and a loftier revelation of the Divine. Above all, there was the expectation, throbbing intensely in the heart of every good Jew, of a Deliverer, an Emancipator, a Messiah, who, like another and a greater Judas Maccabseus, should at least free their race from the Eoman dominion.
The exquisite literature and profound thought of the Greeks were eminently calculated to prepare the way for the diffusion of Christianity : for the ancient faiths could not survive the pitiless criticism of Greek philosophy. This criticism, though seldom made with the express intention of destroying the popular religion, necessarily exposed its crudities and immoralities ; and gradually filtered through to the very lowest strata of society; but, like modern Eationalism, Greek philosophy failed to satisfy the higher aspirations of mankind. The Greeks provided a language which became the medium for the propaganda of the new religion ; for, after the conquests of Alexander, Greek thought and the Greek language became the standard and medium of art, of commerce and literature, throughout three-fourths of the known world. Every Greek colony was a centre of Greek thought and
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influence, and diffused Greek ideas among the neighbouring peoples, and brought them into contact with the distinctive Hellenic conceptions. These colonies — especially through the Dispersion, or foreign colonies of the Jews — exerted a profound influence on the Jewish nation. Influenced by the literary activity of the Greek peoples and the surrounding courts, and impelled by their religious necessities, the Jewish settlers of Alexandria translated the Old Testament into Greek ; and by the partial assimilation of the Greek philosophies and adaptation of their philosophical terminology to religious and theological use, prepared a suitable terminology for the accurate expression of the revelation of God in Christ in a form intelligible to the ancient world.
The expansion of the Roman Empire, whereby the whole civilized world passed under one government, provided the necessary political conditions for the diffusion of the religion of the Christ and the extension of the Kingdom of God. The Eoman peace secured freedom of intercommunication ; the Roman roads, by enabling rapid transit from one part of the Empire to another, provided the means of a rapid missionary propaganda, so that Ethiopia and Gaul, if not Britain, Babylon, and Spain, heard the first gentle whisperings of the gospel of the grace of God before the crucifixion of Christ was a thirty years' old event.