[Footnote 71: See for various statements in this passage, Josephus, _c. Apion_. ii. Section 36; Cic. _De Fin_. v. 25; Clem. Alex. _Strom_, 1, xxii. 150, xxv. v. 14; Euseb.; _Prof. Evang_. x. 4, ix. 5, &c.; Lactant. _Inst. Div_. iv. 2, &c.]
There is something very touching in this fact; but, if there be something very touching, there is also something very encouraging. God was their God as well as ours--their Creator, their Preserver, who left not Himself without witness among them; who, as they blindly felt after Him, suffered their groping hands to grasp the hem of His robe; who sent them rain from heaven, and fruitful seasons, filling their hearts with joy and gladness. And His Spirit was with them, dwelling in them, though unseen and unknown, purifying and sanctifying the temple of their hearts, sending gleams of illuminating light through the gross darkness which encompassed them, comforting their uncertainties, making intercession for them with groaning which cannot be uttered. And more than all, _our_ Saviour was _their_ Saviour, too; He, whom they regarded as a crucified malefactor was their true invisible King; through His righteousness their poor merits were accepted; their inward sicknesses were healed; He whose worship they denounced as an "execrable superstition" stood supplicating for them at the right hand of the Majesty on high, helping them (though they knew Him not) to crush all that was evil within them, and pleading for them when they persecuted even the most beloved of His saints, "Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do."
Yes, they too were all His offspring. Even if they had not been, should we grudge that some of the children's meat should be given unto dogs? Shall we deny to these "unconscious prophecies of heathendom" their oracular significance? Shall we be jealous of the ethical loftiness of a Plato or an Aurelius? Shall we be loth to admit that some power of the Spirit of Christ, even mid the dark wanderings of Seneca's life, kept him still conscious of a nobler and a better way, or that some sweetness of a divine hope inspired the depressions of Epictetus in his slavery? Shall our eye be evil because God in His goodness granted the heathen also to know such truths as enabled them "to overcome the allurements of the visible and the terrors of the invisible world?" Yes, if we have of the Christian Church so mean a conception that we look upon it as a mere human society, "set up in the world to defend a certain religion against a certain other religion." But if on the other hand we believe "that it was _a society established by God as a witness for the true condition of all human beings_, we shall rejoice to acknowledge its members to be what they believed themselves to be,--confessors and martyrs for a truth which they could not fully embrace or comprehend, but which, through their lives and deaths, through the right and wrong acts, the true and false words, of those who understand them least, was to manifest and prove itself. Those who hold this conviction dare not conceal, or misrepresent, or undervalue, any one of those weighty and memorable sentences which are to be found in the _Meditation_ of Marcus Aurelius. _If they did, they would be underrating a portion of that very truth which the preachers of the Gospel were appointed to set forth_; they would be adopting the error of the philosophical Emperor without his excuse for it. Nor dare they pretend that the Christian teaching had unconsciously imparted to him a portion of its own light while he seemed to exclude it. They will believe that it was God's good pleasure that a certain truth should be seized and apprehended by this age, and they will see indications of what that truth was in the efforts of Plutarch to understand the 'Daemon' which guided Socrates, in the courageous language of Ignatius, in the bewildering dreams of the Gnostics, in the eagerness of Justin Martyr to prove Christianity a philosophy ... in the apprehension of Christian principles by Marcus Aurelius, and in his hatred of the Christians. From every side they will derive evidence, _that a doctrine and society which were meant for mankind cannot depend upon, the partial views and apprehensions of men, must go on justifying, reconciling, confuting, those views and apprehensions by the demonstration of facts_" [72]