might have been impossible that these possibilities of his nature should have been _first_ realized with the same solidity and fulness in presence of those mighty truths, speaking of what was above man, which brooded over the history of the Jews and came forth into the world with the Gospel. Yet they are indispensable to the fulness of the Christian work: they are the human material: and that material must be first-rate in its kind. We owe it perhaps permanently to Greece and Rome that we recognise fully the grace of God's original workmanship in man, the validity of his instincts, his individual value, the sacredness and strength of all his natural social bonds, the wisdom and power possessed by his incorporated life. These are things which we could never have realized if all the world had been brought up in the barbarous societies of ancient Europe or under the great despotisms of Egypt and Asia. The religions of Asia may perhaps shew us by contrast the immense importance to a religion of being able to build with sound and adequate materials on the human side. That Greece and Rome did contribute specially in this way to the work of the true religion may be shewn by the way in which men have again and again turned back to these original sources for fresh impulses of liberty or vigour. But these things had their day and passed. The age of Pericles and of Demosthenes, the great days of the Roman Republic, are only epochs in the history, long past at the era of our Lord. We look to see whether there is any positive preparation for Him and His Gospel in the whole drift of that history, and especially in tendencies which took a developed form closer to the era of Christianity[166].