=The chance for a world-Saviour.=—­All over the world just at this time there were strange hopes and longings in men’s hearts.  The Romans had robbed many other nations besides the Jews of their independence.  These people had no real nation of their own any longer to live for—­and they hated Rome.  What was there to make life worth living unless some Redeemer should come from God?

Moreover, it was possible now to think of such a Saviour as a world-Saviour.  In the earlier centuries men hardly knew that there was a world outside their own tribe and a few of their neighbors.  There were no maps.  Only a few could travel, and see for themselves how great a world there really was—­and how many nations there were—­made up of men like themselves.  The common people of Asia scarcely knew that there was a Europe, and the enormous continent of Africa, except for Egypt, did not exist for them.  As for what is now called the New World, North and South America, no one knew of its existence.

=Preparations for Christianity.=—­But the Romans built good roads all over the great countries which bordered on the Mediterranean Sea, and many were the travelers who went to and fro upon them.  They established one government for all this Mediterranean world.  One language came to be understood everywhere—­not Latin, the language of the Romans themselves, but Greek.  Beyond the boundaries of the empire there were, of course, vast territories.  But it was possible now for even the common people to realize that their own village or city or tribe was only a small part of one great world.  And for the first time in history there was a chance for some one to take the old Jewish hope of a better and happier Jewish people and change it into a world-hope of a better and happier human race, and to gather a few men and women together and start them working for it.

THE COMING OF JESUS

In the wonderful providence of God there was born in a manger-cradle just at this moment in history the Baby who was destined to accomplish this miracle; to broaden out to their widest and noblest meanings these hopes which had been handed down from one generation of Jews to another.  The story of the life of Jesus will be given in detail in other courses in this series.  Here, in a nutshell, is what Jesus did:  he helped men to believe in a God who loved all men as his children, whether rich or poor, learned or ignorant, Jews or Gentiles or Samaritans, even the bad as well as the good; for if they were bad, they needed his love to help them to be good.  Jesus not only taught this idea of God through his spoken words; he helped men, through his deeds, to understand it.  He lived that way, as the Son of such a God.  He healed the sick.  He fed the hungry.  He ate and drank with outcasts.  He was everybody’s friend.