loved us God ordained a means of our salvation. The central fact of this gracious plan for our salvation, was the incarnation of the Son of God.

We have followed the course of the revelations by which God prepared a nation, a church, a chosen group of men devout and spiritually minded, who could mediate this world-wide work of redemption from sin to holiness. Some of these were prophets, seers to whom and by whom he revealed his will. Some were devout and humble followers of his revelation, and by the light of revelation, and the experience of holy living, the world was ripened for the great event of history,-the incarnation of the Son of God. "And when the fullness of the time was come, God sent forth his Son." But this fullness of the time included more than the training of the "chosen seed of Israel's race" for its special function as the priest of the world. It embraced the world. The church is Catholic, and has never recognized a narrower mission. The world is the beneficiary of the good will of God, and was prepared for the fullness of that time when our Lord should appear for its redemption.

Now we have seen that for some four hundred years, before the coming of our Lord, the voice of Hebrew prophecy was silent. Four hundred years of which we have no record in the Bible. But they were by no means empty years; on the contrary, they were years of wonderful activity.

The captivity had brought the Jews in contact with the world at many points. From the time of Solomon they had been traders, and were already well qualified by their experience to profit by the opportunities thrust upon them when carried away from their land. They became by necessity just what they have been ever since, a commercial people, a nation of traders, bankers, peddlers and middlemen in the commercial world. In this field they manifested, from the first, an aptitude, which developing with exercise has made them the greatest commercial race the world has ever known. Their vocation as traders naturally

led them to all the cities and towns that offered commercial opportunity, and so we find them from the time of the captivity spreading more and more widely over the civilized world. When they were permitted to return to their own land very few of them cared to do so, and those who did return, were for the most part, those who were not prospering where they were, while the wealthy and prosperous chose rather to remain where they were doing well, rather than to return to their ruined cities and impoverished people.

Thus it came to pass that the Jewish people were scattered by their own choice through every country from India to Spain and from Egypt to the barbarous regions of the north.

But they did not cease to be Jews. They rarely intermarried with the peoples among whom they sojourned, and still more rarely adopted their religion.

They built their synagogues in every city and town where there were sufficient numbers of them, and there met for the reading of the law and for fellowship. Thus they kept alive the spirit of patriotism and loyalty to the religion of their fathers. They cheerfully contributed their yearly stipend to the support of the religious ordinances in Jerusalem, and found great comfort in the fact that they were partakers in the worship, which the white-robed priests with solemn services offered day by day with the morning and evening sacrifice at the holy temple of Jehovah, God of Israel.

Thus developed that remarkable race that for more than two thousand years has been just what it is today, a patriotic people, though without a country; an exclusive people, though scattered among all nations; a religious solidarity with no corporate organization.

Our present interest in this development of Jewish history is because of the very prominent part which these dispersed but loyal groups of worshipers had to perform in the spread of the gospel through the world, as we shall see when we come to study

the Acts of the Apostles.

But the "fullness of the time" involved much more than the development of Jewish history; and, in order to understand the story of Redemption, we must go outside of the Hebrew Scriptures and note the changes that took place in the world during those years of which we have no record in the Bible.

This period was one of marvelous activity. During the time between the last of the prophets and the birth of Jesus of Nazareth, we have almost the whole of Greek philosophy and most of its poetry and art. We have the Rise of the Roman Empire and the development of our western civilization. From Socrates and Plato to Virgil and Horace-almost the whole of classic literature. From Alexander to Augustus,-the great age of empire building. From Pericles to Cicero, from the Parthenon to the Roman Forum-the golden age of art.

The civil law that forms the bed rock of almost every modern constitution, all these and other great achievements belong to those four centuries. No other period of equal length can show so large a list of distinguished names and great works in so many fields. It was a period of reconstruction when the old order changed, giving place to new.

For some two thousand years, from the days of Abraham to the days of Zachariah, we followed, in the Old Testament, the fortunes of the great empires of the ancient world. Egypt and Babylon, Philistia and Tyre and Edom and Moab lie along the visible horizon of the Hebrew nation, and were the great figures, not only in the history of Israel, but of the world.

When we turn the page to the New Tesatment we find ourselves in an entirely new world. Babylon and Nineveh and Edom and Tyre and Philistia have disappeared. Egypt is the only familiar name, and it is but a Roman province, the merest shadow of her former greatness. The Medo-Persian Empire that stretched from India to Egypt has come and gone. The spectacular career of Alexander has run its brief and brilliant

course; and the heavy arm of Imperial Rome bears rule in every part of the western world.

When we consider the world as it was when Jesus came, we may observe three changes that are especially significant in the history of redemption.

First; The heathen religions are all discredited. The old idolatry of Egypt and the east has fallen like Dagon in his temple, Baal and Astarte, Chemosh and Moloch are little more than vague and spectral figures of an outgrown and vanished superstition. Their very names do not appear in the New Test

ament.

The younger gods of Greece are still in vogue, but have lost their influence on all men of intelligence; they were to the enlightened Greek or Roman little more than they are to us— mere figures of speech, poetic symbols for old nature's forces, or the personification of some trait of human character.

It was an age of universal skepticism. Reason had repudiated the ancient faiths, and the very agurs grinned at one another as they exploited the ignorance of the rabble for their selfish profit.

Such was the spiritual bankruptcy of the time that it had nothing to offer that could satisfy the religious instincts of humanity, or answer to the hunger of the soul for fellowship with God.

Yet there was a vague mysterious presentment that something was about to come. "The people were in expectation" and wise men of the east, stirred by this premonition, followed the star of Bethlehem to worship the new born king of the Jews.

The second feature of the time that was of special importance was the almost universal spread of Greek civilization. The political and military power of Alexander was short lived; but it accomplished one thing of immense importance. It spread Greek culture over all the earth. The Greek tongue and habit of thought followed the sword of Greece, and flourished long after that sword was broken and eaten of rust. So that, when Jesus

began to teach in Galilee and in Judea, the Greek tongue was familiar in every town and city of commercial importance in the civilized world. Thus there was ready to hand the finest instrument of thought and most perfect means of expression that the world has ever known.

It was the great highway by which the gospel could go to the ends of the earth. It was the form of civilization that has extended and increased in power down to the present time, and, today, dominates the world from pole to pole.

The third feature of the time was the supremacy of the Roman Empire. It was the golden age of that great power which more than any other, has shaped the modern world and made it what it is. Rome was the hammer by which God beat the plastic nations of that period into the forms that they have to a marvelous degree retained down to the present day. Rome drilled the nations into such habits of order and obedience to law that, even through the doleful centuries that followed her supremacy, they retained the habits and preserved the potency which at length revived and flourished in the nations of our present time.

When we consider how these various achievements of mankind had, each in their independent fields, developed side by side; how each had reached the very point of its development best suited for the introduction of a new and higher form of moral and religious truth, when each had reached the limit of its own peculiar province and had spent its force,-for art and literature and philosophy have never advanced beyond the limits reached by Greece, Roman law and military prowess have not been surpassed,-we cannot but be impressed by the simple phrase of the great apostle "When the fullness of the time had come," "when the fullness of the time had come, God sent forth his son."