The life and work of St. Paul

66 THK LIFE AJKD WORK OF ST. PAUL.
This Dispersion of the Chosen People was one of those three vast and
world-wide events in which a Christian cannot but see the hand of God so
ordering the course of history as to prepare
the world for the Revelation of
Hia Son. (i.) The immense field covered by the conquests of Alexander gave
to the civilised world a Unity of Language, without which it would have been,
humanly speaking, impossible for the earliest preachers to have made known
the good tidings in every land which they traversed, (ii.) The rise of the
.Roman Empire created a Political Unity which reflected in every direction the
doctrines of the new faith, (iii.) The dispersion of the Jews prepared vast
multitudes of Greeks and Romans for the Unity of a pure Morality and a
monotheistic Faith. The Gospel emanated from the capital of Judaea; it
was preached in the tongue of Athens; it was diffused through the empire
of Borne : the feet of its earliest missionaries traversed, from the Euphrates
to the Pillars of Hercules, the solid structure of nndeviating roads by which
" those massive hammers of the whole earth " 1 had
the Roman legionaries
made straight in the desert a highway for our God. Semite and Aryan had
been unconscious instruments in the hands of God for the spread of a religion
which, in its first beginnings, both alike detested and despised. The letters
of Hebrew and Greek and Latin inscribed above the cross were the prophetic
and unconscious testimony of three of the world's noblest languages to the
undying claims of Him who suffered to obliterate the animosities of the
nations which spoke them, and to unite them all together in the one great
Family of God.
This contact of Jew with Greek was fruitful of momentous consequences
both to the Aryan and the Semitic race. It is true that the enormous dif-
ferences between the morals, the habits, the tendencies, the religions systems,
the whole tone of mind and view of life in these two great human families,
inspired them with feelings of mutual aversion and almost detestation. Out
of the chaos of struggling interests which followed the death of Alexander,
there gradually emerged two great kingdoms, the Egyptian and the Syrian,
ruled respectively by the Ptolemies and the Seleucids. These dynasties had
inherited the political conceptions of the great Macedonian conqueror, and
desired to produce a fusion of the heterogeneous elements included in their
government. Both alike turned their eyes to Palestine, which became the
theatre of their incessant contentions, and which passed alternately undor the
sway of each. The Ptolemies, continuing the policy of Alexander, did their
utmost to promote the immigration of Jews into Egypt. The Seleucids, both
by force and by various political inducements, settled them as largely as they
could in their western cities. Alike the Lagidse and the Seleucidse knew the
value of the Jews as quiet and order-loving citizens. To the shores of the
gather together the outcasts ('irj} ; LXX., T 4t