Directly they began to feel the reality of Christ's message, and that He really was a divine Person, then they, naturally, were able to see in His message and teaching a great deal that the fishermen had not understood. They saw that it was a message which could be {226} interpreted in such a way as to fit in with all that philosophical speculation with which the minds of all educated men in the world were full. It not only fitted in with that speculation, but it seemed to come as the crown and the completion of it all. It gave it just what it had been very badly wanting. It brought God into a world that had been seeking, seeking very hard, to find God, but a world, as we have seen, that, in spite of all the seeking, was practically Godless. [Sidenote: The designed end] Now, that is the conclusion of this Greatest Story in the World, or, at least, it is the point at which it seems best to me to leave it. The threads of the story have come together now. They have come together in this sense, that we have the great machine formed by the Roman government ready to convey any message throughout the length and breadth of the world (or of what was then counted as making up the world). That is the first thing. Then we have the Greek thought distributed all along the world roads which this machine had made, and along which it keeps up the communications. And finally we have the Jews, that people of such extraordinary toughness, so marvellously determined to hold on to their own ways of life and of serving God, thoroughly dispersed all the world over, and so carrying their religion and their religious books, which are the base of the Christian religion, with them everywhere. These are the three great facts which have come together at this point at which we are leaving this great story--the Roman world-power, the Greek world-thought, the Christian world-religion. That the last had to go through dreadful trials and suffer terrible persecution before it could become world-wide (even as the world was understood then) makes no {227} difference. The foundations had been laid on which it was to be built. I do not know how it may seem to you, but to me it rather looks as if the whole story, all through the ages, even from the first page where we began to trace it, say some five thousand years before Christ, had been working up to just this point--as if it all had been designed to this end.