Studies in the Gospels: Luke the Gospel for the Greeks [pp. 448-475]

1875.] STUDIES IN THE GOSPELS. 455
thinking world was Greek in its culture and human sympathies,
as a thinking world must always be in unison and sympathy
with the Greek soul.
The Greek thought and culture had been the common possession of mankind for four centuries, when Luke sent forth his
gospel from Antioch. It had done its best for the world in
bringing the races together and preparing them for the grander
Christian view of the brotherhood of humanity; but it had,
nevertheless, utterly failed to help the Greek to attain to his
ideal of the perfect manhood. The vices of the system had
everywhere brought decay and corruption. The old faith in it
was gone beyond possible recovery. Its beauties and graces
remained in the memory of the race only as pleasant dreams
or poetic fancies. Polytheism, as always, had brought dissipa
tion of mind. When Paul entered Athens, he found that "all
the Athenians and strangers which were there, spent their time
in nothing else, but either to tell or to hear some new thing;"
and were ready to think him a "babbler" who should have
aught to say of God and immortality. A thirst for something
new, equaled only by the despair of the old, had everywhere
taken possession of the mind of the age. The indiscriminate
worship of humanity had ushered in the reign of materialism
and sensuality, and the Greek had almost ceased to be more
than a reasoning animal. The worship of the beautiful had
ended, as always, in putting the accomplishments in the place
of all manly and womanly virtues. In short, religion had become a mockery and virtue had perished. There was nothing
left to the Greek worth living for-no divine fatherhood to
bear him comfort; no grand mission in this world to gird and
train him to power; no golden age save in the distant past: no
glorious immortality in the world beyond to open before him
sublime reaches of progress and measureless heights of hopenothing but the earth and the present, with failure already
crushing him, and death with its everlasting sleep remorselessly
pursuing him. Utter restlessness and wretchedness had seized
upon the greatest and purest minds, and the old undefined
longing for some divine man was everywhere verging toward
despair, save as the Jew had quickened and made it more hope
ful by spreading abroad his idea of the Messiah, as the coming
deliverer of the world. When the Gospel went forth from