The literature of the ancient Greeks and the universal empire of the Romans were, next to the
Mosaic religion, the chief agents in preparing the world for Christianity. They furnished the human
forms, in which the divine substance of the gospel, thoroughly prepared in the bosom of the Jewish
theocracy, was moulded. They laid the natural foundation for the supernatural edifice of the kingdom
of heaven. God endowed the Greeks and Romans with the richest natural gifts, that they might
reach the highest civilization possible without the aid of Christianity, and thus both provide the
instruments of human science, art, and law for the use of the church, and yet at the same time show
the utter impotence of these alone to bless and save the world.
The Greeks, few in number, like the Jews, but vastly more important in history than the
numberless hordes of the Asiatic empires, were called to the noble task of bringing out, under a
sunny sky and with a clear mind, the idea of humanity in its natural vigor and beauty, but also in
its natural imperfection. They developed the principles of science and art. They liberated the mind
from the dark powers of nature and the gloomy broodings of the eastern mysticism. They rose to
the clear and free consciousness of manhood, boldly investigated the laws of nature and of spirit,
and carried out the idea of beauty in all sorts of artistic forms. In poetry, sculpture, architecture,
painting, philosophy, rhetoric, historiography, they left true masterpieces, which are to this day
admired and studied as models of form and taste.
All these works became truly valuable and useful only in the hands of the Christian church,
to which they ultimately fell. Greece gave the apostles the most copious and beautiful language to
express the divine truth of the Gospel, and Providence had long before so ordered political
movements as to spread that language over the world and to make it the organ of civilization and
international intercourse, as the Latin was in the middle ages, as the French was in the eighteenth
century and as the English is coming to be in the nineteenth. "Greek," says Cicero, "is read in almost
all nations; Latin is confined by its own narrow boundaries." Greek schoolmasters and artists
followed the conquering legions of Rome to Gaul and Spain. The youthful hero Alexander the
Great, a Macedonian indeed by birth, yet an enthusiastic admirer of Homer, an emulator of Achilles,
a disciple of the philosophic world-conqueror, Aristotle, and thus the truest Greek of his age,
conceived the sublime thought of making Babylon the seat of a Grecian empire of the world; and
though his empire fell to pieces at his untimely death, yet it had already carried Greek letters to the
borders of India, and made them a common possession of all civilized nations. What Alexander
had begun Julius Caesar completed. Under the protection of the Roman law the apostles could
travel everywhere and make themselves understood through the Greek language in every city of
the Roman domain.
The Grecian philosophy, particularly the systems of Plato and Aristotle, formed the natural
basis for scientific theology; Grecian eloquence, for sacred oratory; Grecian art, for that of the
Christian church. Indeed, not a few ideas and maxims of the classics tread on the threshold of
revelation and sound like prophecies of Christian truth; especially the spiritual soarings of Plato,^74(^74) Compare C. Ackermann, The Christian Element in Plato and the Platonic Philosophy, 1835, transl. from the German by
S. R. Asbury, with an introductory note by Dr. Shedd. Edinburgh, 1861.
A.D. 1-100.