learned among the Greeks and Romans at the time Christianity first sought to propagate itself, we mean to say that such principles as these were still in vogue. Men were seeking for truth, and grasping at happiness; but whim and passion predominated in their movements, and the few sound principles they had discovered were warped and whirled down into the abyss of sensuality and selfishness. The philosophers had all gone astray in their own conceits-Peripatetics, Stoics, Cynics-all were out at sea, without a helm to guide them to the port. The old systems had fallen down from very old age; new ones had been constructed from their materials. Pythagoras had gone off the stage long since, and Parmenides, and Empedocles, and Antisthenes, and Socrates, and Plato, and the primitive founders of sects; but Musonius, Favorinus, Athenodorus, and a thousand others perpetuated their views, modified, and under other names. Error and Truth! the aggressor and the assailed. Error and Truth irreconcilable; moral Error, leading, under the name of wisdom, to crime; intellectual Error, under the same name and standard, leading its votaries to a denial of evident principles. Truth, come down from heaven, necessarily came into collision with Error, intellectual and moral, and consequently with philosophy as it then existed; for her mission was to seek the lost sheep, and to bring back profligate children who had been wandering on the hills, far away from the house of God.

Greece, with its profligacy and its unsound philosophical theories, was fully as unprepared as Rome to receive the good tidings" that the Apostles were commissioned to announce. Both were infected alike with the blighting effects of pagan training; but surely there was one nation better disposed towards the Gospel, from its long familiarity with true and holy things, where it was natural to expect that every facility would be given to the spread of doctrines which are only a further development of the revered principles of an ancient revelation of which it had been the depository and the guardian. This nation was Judea.

DIVISION III.

THE JEWISH ELEMENT OF OPPOSITION.

Or the Messiah it had been predicted in the Sacred Scripture that the Lord "shall give the nations in his sight, and he shall rule over kings: he shall give them as the dust to his sword, as stubble driven by the wind, to his bow ;" and in reference to his reign upon earth it had been said: "I will open rivers in the high hills, and fountains in the midst of the plains: I will turn the desert into pools of waters, and the impassable lands into streams of waters. I will plant in the wilderness the cedar, and the thorn, and the myrtle, and the olive-tree: I will set in the desert the fir-tree, the elm, and the box-tree together." And of the prosperous change that should follow his coming, the prophet Jeremias had written: "There shall be again in this place, that is desolate without man, and without beast, and in all the cities thereof, an habitation of shepherds causing their flocks to lie down. And in the cities on the mountains, and in the cities of the plains, and in the cities that are towards the south: and in the land of Benjamin and round about Jerusalem, and in the cities of Juda shall the flocks pass again under the hand of him that numbereth them, saith the Lord. Behold the days come, saith the Lord, and I will perform the good word that I have spoken to the house of Israel, and to the house of Juda. În those days, and at that time I will make the bud of justice to spring forth unto David, and he shall do judgment and justice upon the earth. In those days shall Juda be saved, and Jerusalem shall dwell securely and this is the name that they shall call him, the Lord, the

1 Isaias, xli. 2. 2 Id. v. 18, 19.

3 Jeremias, xxxiii. 12, et seq.

just one." One seer hath proclaimed the perpetuity of his kingdom: "And I have gathered them together unto their own land, and I have not left any of them there. And I will hide my face no more from them.". "Whose kingdom," said Daniel, "shall be an everlasting kingdom, and all kings shall serve him and obey him."

The Jews were only too happy to interpret these and similar predictions in a strictly literal sense. From the days of Moses they had been invariably a repining and dissatisfied race. They had become tired of their prophets, their judges, and their kings in turn. They had been put in possession of a land "flowing with milk and honey," and it was not fertile enough for them. They had a temple, which all the world respected, and they turned it into a "house of traffic." They longed to return to Zion, when they were in the Babylonish captivity; and when they were conducted back to their own country, their first act was to rebel against their leaders. They complained of being obliged to serve in war. They complained of taxes. They complained of everything. Through the deep cloud of despondency that hung over them, there was but one ray of hope shining, and this was from the Messias that was to come to deliver their race from bondage, and to elevate it above the surrounding nations. There was but little spirituality among the Jews, though they were the most spiritually favoured nation on the face of the earth. Their ideas were earthly and carnal. Their tastes were sensual. Their conceptions of even the most sublime truths were not unmixed with grossness. They expected a deliverer, but they aspired to be delivered from their temporal evils only. They desired to be redeemed; but they wanted a redeemer according to their own hearts. They looked forward to the Messias, and they discovered in him a great temporal sovereign mighty in peace and unconquerable in war. It was scarcely to be expected that the Redeemer, born in poverty, nurtured in privations, would be consonant to the tastes of the Jews. They would

1 Ezekiel, xxxix. 28 et seq.

discover grounds of insurmountable objection to him in the declaration so clearly and frequently put forth, that his " 'kingdom is not of this world." They would be, in all probability, lashed into fury against him, his doctrine, and the religion he founded, by the absolute termination that he appeared to put to their long-cherished hopes of temporal preponderance and ascendancy: for he had declared that their "habitation should become desolate;" he had insinuated that the Gentiles should come to lay it waste; he had gone so far as to say that of their renowned temple not a stone should remain upon a

stone."

66

Apart from the consideration of the lowly appearance of the Saviour, and the unearthly nature of his conquests and reign, a feeling of insecurity with regard to its exclusive possession of spiritual things, came upon a selfish race, and filled its soul with jealousy and spite. The grace and favours of heaven were now about to be communicated to the Gentiles. It would have been some consolation to the Pharisees, in their disappointment as to the character of the Messias, if they were allowed to continue to be regarded as the models of true believers and the teachers of morals. And the Scribes, if they were to be continued in their office as expounders of the law, might have made up their minds to interpret the prophetic writings in a sense less favourable to the pretensions of their race. But, if Christianity was true, there was an end to all exclusiveness. The monopoly of the Scribes and Pharisees, as well as of the people at large, was destroyed, and the descendants "of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob," were to stand side by side in the sanctuary with the profane and impious. Now were the words of Osee to be fulfilled in the vocation of extern nations: "I will call that which was not my people, my people; and that which was not beloved, beloved; and her that had not obtained mercy, one that hath obtained mercy." The appellation of “children of God" was to be communicated to aliens, in verifi

1 Osee, ii. 24.

cation of another saying of the same prophet. "And it shall be, in the place where it was said unto them, you are not my people there they shall be called the sons of the living God." And, worst of all, the strangers were to be preferred to the old domestics of the house of the Lord, for the words of Isaias, when he announces the adoption of the Gentiles and the reprobation of the Jews, were declared to be applicable to present times. "I was found by them that did not seek me: I appeared openly to them that asked not after me." But to Israel he saith, "All the day long have I spread my hands to a people that believeth not, and contradicteth me."4

2

A large amount of spirituality, and a total absence of selfishness, were the dispositions necessary for the Jewish people as a preparation for the reception of Christ and his heavenly doctrine. If they had such dispositions in the era of the successors of Augustus Cæsar, they must have undergone a great revolution of sentiment and feeling within a few years, and must have realized a state of national morals, for which we are little prepared by their previous annals and history.

Such were, at the time of the Apostles, the elements of opposition to the Gospel in the Roman, Grecian, and Jewish societies-elements restless and chafing, repelling each other, but united in a common repugnance to all that is just and true; and it was among these that the Church was now to enter for the first time, and with them to combat for the mastery over the heart and intelligence of man. They may be summed up in a few words :-philosophy, pantheism, passion, prejudice, and pride. Philosophy occupied a place in the minds of the educated Greeks and Romans of the day, offering as it did, a thousand solutions for the moral problems that are most interesting to man, and chained in a particular manner to Grecian society as a principle and centre of the olden glories of the PeloponThe poetry and literature of the age were tinged

nesus.

1 Osee i. 10. 2 Romans x. 20, 21. 3 Isaias lxv. 1. 4 Isaias lxv. 2.