OF THE PETITION OF CERTAIN GREEKS. BY LEONARD WOOLSEY BACON, IN THE WOODLAND CHURCH, PHILADELPHIA. Now there were certain Greek's among those that went up to worship at the feast: these therefore came to Philip, which was of Bethsaida of Galilee, and asked him saying, Sir, we would see Jesus. Philip cometh and telleth Andrew: Andrew cometh, and Philip, and they tell Jesus. And Jesus answereth them saying, The hour is come, that the Son of Man should be glorified. [With the following verses.]—John xii: 20-33.

THIS being, in some respects, a difficult Scripture to intelligent readers (it presents no difficulty at all to the unintelligent) is presumptively a specially profitable Scripture to as many as shall come to understand it. For it is God's method in the difficulties of sacred Scripture, first, to provoke and stimulate inquiry, and then splendidly to reward it.

The questions that arise on the first reading of this story are several first, what is the importance of the incident, that it should be mentioned at all? secondly, why there should have been so much hesitation and consultation among the disciples over so simple a matter as this request of "certain Greeks?" thirdly, why it should be that after the request had been related with so much particularity, nothing is distinctly said of what came of itwhether it was granted or not? finally, what was there in this seemingly trifling incident, just mentioned by one evangelist and then dropped, not so much as mentioned by the other three, that should so have agitated the soul of the Son of Man that He should almost be ready to say, "Father, save me from this hour?" What is the connection between the message of Philip and An

drew to their Master that certain Greek visitors to Jerusalem at the Passover wished to see Him, and the answer that he made "the hour is come; the Son of Man is to be glorified-but only through death. This grain of wheat, if it be preserved, will be but sterile; it must fall into the ground and die, and then shall it bring forth much fruit?" If we would know these things, we must study deeply into the spirit of the four Gospels, if by any means we may attain to the fellowship of Christ's sufferings.

The message of the Greeks came to the ear of our Lord just at that juncture in His ministry when He began to feel with its heaviest weight the meaning of those words of the prophet Isaiah, which He had been wont to read aloud in the synagogues of Nazareth and Capernaum-the words "despised and rejected of men." There had been days -the earlier days of His Galilean ministry-when all who heard Him seemed ready to bow in homage before the words which He spake with such authority. In the presence of His mighty works of healing, the voice of selfish bigotry itself seemed to be stricken dumb, and the contradiction of sinners to be abashed and put to shame. Here at Jerusalem, amid the pride of learning of the scribes, and the pride of 'place and nation" of the priests and rulers, it was different; but even here such crowds followed to gaze upon the man who had raized up Lazarus from the dead, that it was said among His enemies, "behold, the whole world is gone after Him." And yet, for all this, it is evident, even to an unprophetic eye, that He is rejected of His own nation. He has come to His own, and His own receive Him not. For long months the bigoted Pharisee and the skeptical

Sadducee, who never have agreed on anything before, have been working with one accord to entangle Him in His talk, and embroil Him either with one party or with the other. Scribes and priests and rulers have been dogging Him from one retreat to another as spies upon His words and deeds. They have plotted murder in private. They have tried to provoke the mob to bloody violence in the Temple court. Already they are beginning to draw the heathen governor into their plans, and to tamper with one of the twelve disciples with proposals of treachery. His near friends will not believe it when He tells hem; but there is no illusion in His Own mind. He knows the set, fanatic purpose of His enemies to take His life. And, notwithstanding many evidences of popular affection, He knows the circumstances that are combining to abet that purpose. How soon the bloody end of that lovely and blameless life shall come, is evidently a question only of a few days. From amidst the incessant cavilings, disputes, intrigues, treasons, conspiracies, with which all this part of the story is filled, two incidents, which come close together in this Gospel of John, stand out in delightful contrast with the rest. The first is that

jubilant processional entrance into the city and Temple with the palm-branches and hosannas of the multitude; and the other is this petition of "certain Greeks."

Looking carefully into the language of the story we find some slight but clear and unmistakable indications of what sort of people these Greeks were. The tense of the Greek verb used is significant: they were "among those who were in the habit of coming to the feast"-not chance-comers, passers-by on a journey, but habitual attendants at the Passover feast. And, secondly, they were not mere tourists, or sight-seers, such as doubtless did gather to witness that wonderful pageant, so unlike anyting the world beside could show-a -hole nation congregated to solemnize e memory of a Divine deliverance; mese Greeks were among those who ere wont to come up to the feast, not

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to gaze but "to worship." These minute but distinct indications mark this group of inquirers after Jesus as representative men. They belonged to a class destined to fulfil a great and important part in the subsequent history of the kingdom of Christ-the class described again and again in the Acts of the Apostles under such titles as "devout Greeks," "devout persons," "they that feared God." The phrases are familiar to all attentive readers of the book of Acts, and you recognize how great was the part which this sort of people fulfilled in the spread of the Gospel to the ends of the earth. They were not converts to the Jews' religion, you understand. They never had received the sacrament of naturalization and adoption into the family of Abraham, nor acknowledged the obligation on them of the ordinances of the Mosaic law. Outwardly they were Gentiles still; but Gentiles who had seen the folly and falsehood of the heathen idolatries, and were seeking for something better. Such unrest and dissatisfaction with the "outworn creeds" of Paganism were felt throughout the Roman world. Some tried to rest in a general disbelief of all religion. Some tried to borrow a religion from Egypt or the East, and under the pressure of this demand the importing of foreign religions grew into a trade. [This was the ready explanation that occurred to some of the Athenian idlers as they listened to Paul and his "new doctrine" from the benches of the Areopagusthat "he seems to be one of those introducers of foreign divinities."] But in the midst of men's waverings and gropings, these "devout Greeks" had found what they were looking for in the Jew's synagogue. For already the Jews were wandering everywhere, and wherever a few families of them sojourned there was the synagogue. Every sev enth day they met to read in Moses and the prophets of the hope of Israel, and with them, not only the converts who had entered into the Hebrew citizenship, but neighbors and fellow-worshipers who knew no citizenship but

that of Rome - men who, seeking thoughtfully from one school of philosophy to another the answer to the questions, What is happiness? What is virtue? What is the highest good?-had found, at last, in Moses and David, teachers greater than Plato or Aristotle. The synagogue meetings used to be full of these outsiders. The Jews had a name for them, calling them, not converts, for they were not such-calling them "proselytes of the gate," as if hinting that they did not get beyond the threshold.* Such an one was the devout centurion Cornelius at Cesarea; another such was the good centurion at Capernaum, who built the marble synagogue because he loved the Jewish people. They were very apt to be centurions or soldiers. Such were the "honorable women which were Greeks," whom Paul more than once found among his eager listeners in the synagogue. They were very apt to be women, revolted by the wickedness of heathen religions. Such were the multitudes at Antioch in Pisidia, who listened gladly to the Gospel, when the Jews blasphemed and contradicted, until Paul and Barnabas waxed bold and said to the Jews, "seeing ye put from you the Word of God, and judge yourselves unworthy of eternal life, lo, we turn to the Gentiles." Wherever the Apostles went, it was the "devout Greeks" that were the open door by which the Gospel entered upon its triumphs in the Roman world. Neither was the preparation of the heathen mind for the Gospel limited to these half-proselytes. Through the heathen literature of this period, the scholar is startled every now and then to come upon thoughts that seem strangely Christian as we readthoughts of a holier God, of a higher morality, of a larger humanity—they are the thoughts of men who are straining their eyes to find the light, and who

*Dr. Edersheim (Jesus the Messiah, vol. ii. p. 390, note) gives a reason, which is hardly conclusive, for reckoning the Greeks, who sought to see Jesus, as "proselytes of righteousness." This view might be admitted without substantially weakening the argument of this discourse.

already begin to get some glimpse of that true Light which lighteth every man that cometh into the world.

And alongside of this preparedness to receive the Gospel, which is discovered in the heathen mind of that age, is that marvelous providential preparation to dispense it, which is the admiration of all intelligent history. How often we say to each other, over the morning paper, "we live in a wonderful age!" The men of Paul's time and of Jesus' time lived in an age just so wonderful. Then, as now, the world had been brought into one place. The multitude of wrangling principalities, whose perpetual warfare had kept the earth in turmoil, had blocked the paths of commerce, and had disturbed the retreats of philosophy and the sanctuaries of religion, have been suppressed and supplanted by a universal empire, which may plunder and oppress, but will suffer none beside to do it; the track of whose conquests is the pioneering of great highways of peaceful trade; and whose title of Roman citizen is a panoply and safeguard to its wearer to the ends of the earth. And with the universal empire has grown up the universal language of literature, and thought, and commercethe Greek. On this incomparable language it seemed as if the providence of God had conferred a sort of Pentecostal gift, that by means of it men of the most widely different lands and religions might hear and know His wonderful works.

It is evident-more evident to us than it was to the men of that generationthat the world was ripe for some great change. The nations, an-hungered, were seated by fifties, and there was a hush as of expectation that one should break and bring to them the bread of life.

Bearing these great facts in mind, we turn back to the story of the request of certain Greeks for audience of the great Teacher, and we find that in its method it seems marked with a sense of the grave importance of it. They would not venture to come with it directly to