ew
who longed and hoped with increasing ardor for a living Redeemer, a
personal Mediator, who should "stand between God and man and lay his
hand on both." Christ became in some dim consciousness "the Desire of
Nations," and the Moral Law became even to the Greek as well as the Jew
"a school-master to lead them to Him."

[Footnote 859: Neander's "Church History," vol. i. p. 4.]

The arrival of Paul at Athens, in the close of this brilliant period of
Greek philosophy, now assumes an aspect of deeper interest and
profounder significance. It was a grand climacteric in the life of
humanity--an epoch in the moral and religious history of the world. It
marked the consummation of a periodic dispensation, and it opened a new
era in that wonderful progression through which an overruling Providence
is carrying the human race. As the coming of the Son of God to Judea in
the ripeness of events--"the fullness of time"--was the consummation of
the Jewish dispensation, and the event for which the Jewish age had been
a preparatory discipline, so the coming of a Christian teacher to
Athens, in the person of "the Apostle of the Gentiles," was the
_terminus ad quem_ towards which all the phases in the past history of
philosophic thought had looked, and for which they had prepared.
Christianity was brought to Athens--brought into contact with Grecian
philosophy at the moment of its exhaustion--at the moment when, after
ages of unwearied effort, it had become conscious of its weakness, and
its comparative failure, and had abandoned many questions in despair.
Greek philosophy had therefore its place in the plan of Divine
Providence. It had a mission to the world; that mission was now
fulfilled. If it had laid any foundation in the Athenian mind on which
the Christian system could plant its higher truths--if it had raised up
into the clearer light of consciousness any of those _ideas_ imbedded in
the human reason which are germane to Christian truth--if it had
revealed more fully the wants and instincts of the human heart, or if it
had attained the least knowledge of eternal truth and immutable right,
upon this Christianity placed its _imprimatur_. And at those points
where human reason had been made conscious of its own inefficiency, and
compelled to own its weakness and its failure, Christianity shed an
effulgent and convincing light.

Therefore the preparatory office of Greek religion and Greek philosophy
is fully recognized by Paul in h