d without emotion,
pervading all, and transcending all, is too vague and abstract to yield
us comfort, and to exert over us any persuasive power. "Our moral
weakness shrinks from it in trembling awe. The heart can not feed on
sublimities. We can not make a home of cold magnificence; we can not
take immensity by the hand."[931] Hence the need and the desire that God
shall condescendingly approach to man, and by some manifestation of
himself in human form, and through the sensibilities of the human heart,
commend himself to the heart of man--in other words, the need of an
_Incarnation_. Thus did the education of our race, by the dispensation
of philosophy, prepare the way for him who was consciously or
unconsciously "_the Desire of Nations_," and the deepening earnestness
and spiritual solicitude of the heathen world heralded the near approach
of Him who was not only "the Hope of Israel" but "the Saviour of the
world."

[Footnote 930: Acts xvii. 26, 27.]

[Footnote 931: Caird.]

The idea of an _Incarnation_ was not unfamiliar to human thought, it was
no new or strange idea to the heathen mind. The numberless metamorphoses
of Grecian mythology, the incarnations of Brahm, the avatars of Vishnu,
and the human form of Krishna had naturalized the thought.[932] So that
when the people of Lystra saw the apostles Paul and Barnabas exercising
supernatural powers of healing, they said, "The gods have come down to
us in the likeness of men!" and they called Barnabas Jupiter, and Paul,
Mercurius. The idea in its more definite form may have been, and indeed
was, communicated to the world through the agency of the dispersed Jews.
So that Virgil, the Roman poet, who was contemporary with Christ, seems
to re-echo the prophecy of Isaiah--

The last age decreed by the Fates is come,
And a new frame of all things does begin;
A holy progeny from heaven descends
Auspicious in his birth, which puts an end
To the iron age, and from which shall arise
A golden age, most glorious to behold.

[Footnote 932: Young's "Christ of History," p. 248.]

II. _Finally, Greek philosophy prepared the way for Christianity by
awakening and deepening the consciousness of guilt, and the desire for
Redemption_.

The consciousness of sin, and the consequent need of expiation for sin,
were gradually unfolded in the Greek mind. The idea of sin was at first
revealed in a confused and indefinite feeling of some external,
supernat