identification of religion with
ethnic consciousness and of political consciousness with both religious
and race feeling. Each people had its own tribal or national gods, who
were inventoried as national assets at valuations quite as high as those
attached to tribal or national territory.

When, however, Roman imperial rule had been extended over the civilized
world, the culture conflicts that then arose expended their
group-creating force in simply bringing together like believers in
sectarian association. Christianity, appealing to all bloods, in some
measure to all economic classes, and spreading into all sections of the
eastern Mediterranean region, did not to any great extent create
communities. And what was true of Christianity was in like manner true
of the Mithras cult, widely diffused in the second Christian century.
Even Mohammedanism, a faith seemingly well calculated to create
autonomous states, in contact with a world prepared by Roman
organization could not completely identify itself with definite
political boundaries.

The proximate causes of these contrasts are not obscure. We must suppose
that a self-sufficing community might at one time, as well as at
another, be drawn together by formative beliefs. But that it may take
root somewhere and, by protecting itself against destructive external
influences, succeed for a relatively long time in maintaining its
integrity and its solidarity, it must enjoy a relative isolation. In a
literal sense it must be beyond easy reach of those antagonistic forces
which constitute for it the outer world of unbelief and darkness.

Such isolation is easily and often possible, however, only in the early
stages of political integration. It is always difficult and unusual in
those advanced stages wherein nations are combined in world-empires. It
is becoming well-nigh impossible, now that all the continents have been
brought under the sovereignty of the so-called civilized peoples, while
these peoples themselves, freely communicating and intermingling,
maintain with one another that good understanding which constitutes
them, in a certain broad sense of the term, a world-society. The
proximate effects also of the contrast that has been sketched are
generally recognized.

So long as blood sympathy, religious faith, and political consciousness
are approximately coterminous, the groups that they form, whether local
communities or nations, must necessarily be rather sharply deli