218 COSMIC PHILOSOPHY. [PT. n. 



to its very incomplete integration. An aggregate of the 

 national type was in process of formation by the extensive 

 coalescence of maritime cities under the leadership of Athens, 

 when the Peloponnesian war intervened, vindicating the 

 superiority of selfish autonomy, and showing by its result 

 that the civilizing spirit of nationality was as yet too feeble 

 to prevail. 



It was first under Roman dominion that national a^re- 



oo 



gation and the feeling of national solidarity began to be 

 brought to something like completeness. By absorbing 

 nearly all the petty communities then existing within the 

 limits of the Mediterranean world, and by gradually extend- 

 ing to their members the privileges of citizenship, Eome 

 succeeded in dealing to the passion for autonomy a blow 

 from which it has never recovered ; while the enormous 

 extent of the Empire, and its ethnic heterogeneity, imparted 

 to the national spirit thus evoked, a cosmopolitan character 

 viestined to be of prodigious service to civilization. The 

 influence of these circumstances upon the attitude of Chris 

 tianity I have already alluded to, and it cannot be too 

 strongly insisted upon. No human mind could have even 

 conceived, much less have carried into execution, the idea of 

 a universal religion, if the antique state of social isolation 

 had not previously been brought to a close in universal 

 empire. If Christianity had appealed four centuries earlier 

 than it did, it would, like Buddhism, have assumed the garb 

 of a local religious reformation. Or if it could have aimed 

 at anything higher and more comprehensive than this, its 

 preaching would have fallen upon ears not ready to receive 

 it. All the Oriental enthusiasm, all the Hellenic subtlety, of 

 Paul, could have effected nothing, had he visited Athens in 

 the days of Plato and Diogenes. But the cosmopolitan 

 element in Eoman civilization was just that which Chris 

 tianity most readily assimilated, and which it intensified by 

 setting up a new principle of common action in place of the 



