History of Religious Evolution 743 



power and majesty, imbued with attributes such as man might 

 group round the person of one who represented their highest 

 mental conception or proenvironed picture. So reverence for 

 God, rather than confiding love in him, was the mental ten- 

 dency in man. Furthermore the intensely national and even 

 personal character and connection of God with each nation and 

 individual, such as were generally proenvironed, promoted 

 a family and national sentiment often of enduring kind, but 

 failed to develop an international regard of man for man. 

 Unquestionably the nearest approach to this regard is showTi 

 by Cyrus and the Medo-Persian nation, in their relation to 

 conquered nationalities. This is fully acknowledged in the 

 Hebrew Old Testament and was a fruit of the joyous, expan- 

 sive, and all-embracing conception the Zoroastrians had of 

 Ahura Mazda (or Ormazd). This was in striking contrast 

 to the narrow, selfish, and exclusive view entertained regarding 

 Yahweh, who was associated with a tribal or restricted national 

 outlook. 



As we now survey the completed record of Christ's and of 

 Paul's life and teachings, the question may well be asked: 

 What were the great principles that caused their teachings 

 to assume an international importance? We would reply: 

 first, that they emphasized the already accepted principles 

 of sobriety in all things; second, they proclaimed a new and 

 only additional command to those already accepted by man, 

 viz., "that ye love one another"; third, they had an intense 

 self-conscious belief in the view that each was a part of and 

 proceeded from God, the great final power and energizer of 

 the world; fourth, they equally clearly taught that all men 

 were brethren, since all had proceeded from and were tem- 

 porary expressions of an infinite power or Godhead; fifth, that 

 all who would aspire to and reach the high cogitic and spiritic 

 platform that they had reached must subdue the biotic and 

 the cognitic so as to "bring into subjection" the latter to the 

 former, and so fulfill the highest claim of human life, by making 

 the lower or biotic and cognitic energies subservient and mui- 

 isters to the higher cogitic and spiritic; sixth, that when such 



