Page:Visions and Prophecies of Zechariah (Baron, David).djvu/267

 reference to the universal spread of the knowledge of Jehovah through the instrumentality of Israel, has already been fulfilled, or is now exhaustively fulfilling itself in this gospel dispensation.

Thus one of them, commenting on these verses, writes:

"Zechariah describes vividly the eagerness and mutual impulse with which not only many, but mighty nations should throng to the gospel, and every fresh conversion should win others also, till the great tide should sweep through the world."

" The inhabitants of one city shall go to another. It is one unresting extension of the faith, the restlessness of faith and love. They shall not be satisfied with their own salvation, careless about the salvation of others; they shall employ all labour and industry, with wondrous love, to provide for the salvation of others as if it were their own. It is a marvellous stirring of minds. Missionary efforts, so familiar with us as to be a household word, were unknown then. The time was not yet come. Before the faith in Christ came, the Jewish people were not to be the converters of mankind. They were to await Him, the Redeemer of the world, through Whom and to Whom they were to be first converted, and then the world through those who were of them. This mutual conversion was absolutely unknown. The prophet predicts certainly that it would be, and in God's time it was. From you, St. Paul writes to a small colony in Greece, sounded out the Word of the Lord, not only in Macedonia and Achaia, but also in every place your faith to God ward is spread abroad. Your faith he writes to the heathen capital of the world, is spoken of throughout the whole world Within eighty years after our Lord's ascension the Roman governor of Bithynia reported, on occasion of the then persecution, that it spread as a contagion. The contagion of that superstition traversed not cities only, but villages and scattered houses too. Before the persecution the temples had been desolated, the solemn rites long intermitted, the sacrificed animals had very rarely found a purchaser. An impostor of the same date